Fossil fuel emissions bar chart

We've added about 370 gigatons of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial age. Keeping the total to 500 gigatons or less to avoid "dangerous climate change," says James Hansen, means slashing coal-fired power in favor of nuclear, renewables.

Hansen, et al./PLOS One

Polluters must pay for their carbon dioxide emissions, and nuclear energy must expand, says climatologist James Hansen, who retired this year from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Otherwise there is little chance the world can avoid the worst disruptive impacts of climate change, like unstable coastlines and mass extinctions of animal and plant species.

Hansen spoke at Wednesday's session of the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in San Francisco.

From the outset of industrialization through 2012, Hansen told fellow scientists, human activities have added about 370 gigatons of CO₂ to the atmosphere. Destruction of forests, and soil-eroding agricultural practices, are equivalent to an additional 100 gigatons. These forces have warmed the Earth's surface temperature about 1 degree C, with more warming inevitable due to slower-moving geo-physical reactions, like the release of excess heat absorbed by the ocean.

Ending use of coal-fired power over the next three decades might hold warming to about that 1 degree, said Hansen. But only if the world does not burn unconventional fossil fuels like tar sands, as well.

With just two percent of the world's power generated by non-hydropower renewables like solar and wind, said Hansen, only a rapid expansion of nuclear power can realistically slash use of coal and other fossil fuels within the next 30 years. But the public's emotional, "quasi-religious" rejection of nuclear power is holding back much-needed research and development that would bring advanced nuclear technologies into the energy mix, he said—designs that he believes would largely solve environmental and safety problems that have spooked the public.

He asked his fellow scientists to be braver and bolder about studying nuclear energy and communicating it publicly. 

As for putting a price on CO₂ pollution, Hansen stated that an “across-the-board fee at the source,” like the coal mine or the port of entry for imported fuel, would be much more effective at ending the use of coal than mandating use of renewable energy. Such legislated “renewable energy portfolios,” which require utilities to get a certain percentage of their energy supply from solar, wind, and other non-fossil sources, don't take into account either the true costs of renewables, or the artificially low costs of fossil fuels, said Hansen.

Once the price of coal and other fossil energy reflects the actual toll on health, the climate, and the environment, “transparent” and “market-driven” dynamics will suppress their use while making renewables more price-competitive.

Hansen took his scientific and technical data on CO₂ emissions and energy supplies from research published last week in the journal PLOS One, “Assessing 'Dangerous Climate Change'”. IN the paper, Hansen and co-authors try to establish what the maximum safe amount of historical carbon emissions may be, if climate change is to be slowed or stopped.

“Our parents did now know that their actions could harm future generations,” suggested Hansen. “We will only be able to pretend that we did not know.”

The Year In Science

Jesse Lenz

It was a great year in reading, but no one could've caught all of the amazing science and technology stories. So we've rounded up a few--from Popular Science, as well as plenty of other places--and placed them here for your convenience. Enjoy, and feel free to add some in the comments. 

The Mind Of A Con Man

The New York Times

Diederik Stapel was a respected professor, until it was discovered that he'd fabricated much of his work. This is the story of how he got there. 

“After he got home that night, he confessed to his wife. A week later, the university suspended him from his job and held a news conference to announce his fraud. It became the lead story in the Netherlands and would dominate headlines for months. Overnight, Stapel went from being a respected professor to perhaps the biggest con man in academic science.”

The Operator 

The New Yorker

Dr. Oz is not only perhaps the best-known doctor in America, but also has an impressive academic and professional pedigree. So why does so much of what he says sound like bunk?

“Oz has become used to crowds, to adulation, and to fame. That morning, when he arrived in darkness, hundreds of people, mostly women, already stood in line at the entrance to the hospital; many lacked insurance, a doctor, or medical support of any kind. There were screams of delight when he hopped out of the car. People had come for the free exam and for helpful advice, but also to see him.”

Apex Predator

Copyright MacGillivray Freeman Films/Photographer: Peter Kragh

Apex Predator

Popular Science

Inside the quest to save the sharks, with help from homemade tracking systems.

"'He got cut up pretty bad wrangling the second tiger.' 

Pretty bad, it turns out, means 15 stitches in his finger and blood everywhere. When I see Hammerschlag on the research vessel, he is wearing a large bandage and looks concerned. 'Please don't make a big deal out of my cut,' he says. 'I grazed my finger on a tooth. It wasn't an attack.'"

Must Cats Die So Birds Can Live?

New York

A look at the incredibly heated debate between two breeds of animal lover. 

" 'That is, if you’ll pardon my French, complete bullshit,' says Ed Clark, Virginia accent booming across the Upper East Side bistro he’s stopped at on the way to Greenwich, where he’s giving a talk to donors to the Wildlife Center of Virginia, the animal hospital at which he sees, on average, 250 cat-inflicted injuries a year. 'Have you ever seen a cat kill a bird?' he asks. 'They slice ’em right down the middle.' He traces a line up his stomach. 'Whoosh.' "

The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think

The Atlantic

A profile of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas Hofstadter, whose ideas on artificial intelligence have fallen out of favor in recent years. But then again, it's possible he was right all along. 

"Hofstadter’s account of computer programs that weren’t just capable but creative, his road map for uncovering the 'secret software structures in our minds,' launched an entire generation of eager young students into AI.

But then AI changed, and Hofstadter didn’t change with it, and for that he all but disappeared."

Uprising

Matter

What gas leaks mean for climate change.

"His boss had the wheel. Roland Boucher was an older, heavy-set man with pale white skin and ruddy cheeks. A mess of electronics sat between the dashboard and front seat, with tubes connecting to a black box the size of a lunchbox. Just a few metres below them, encased in the soil, streets and yards of Massachusetts, natural gas mains and smaller service lines spread out like the bronchioles of a human lung. As his map flapped in the road-wind, Ackley focused on the instruments and tried to spot a leak."

The Nazi Anatomists

Slate

Experiments run by Nazis are still informing medicine today.

“For centuries, anatomists around the globe struggled to find an adequate supply of bodies. The need was keen—without corpses, there could be no dissection for research and medical training. ... That changed as the Nazi courts ordered dozens and then hundreds of civilian executions each year, for an estimated total of 12,000 to 16,000 from 1933 to 1945. (The 6 million who were killed in concentration camps are counted separately, as are the many millions more who were otherwise mass-murdered.) Plötzensee and other prisons delivered to anatomists a sudden abundance. In the mid-1930s, British anatomists described with envy the “valuable sources of material” their German counterparts had."

Decisions, Decisions

Sam Kaplan

The Chemistry Of Kibble

Popular Science

Why pet food is a billion-dollar science. 

"AFB designs powdered flavor coatings for the edible extruded shapes. Moeller came to AFB from Frito-Lay, where his job was to design, well, powdered flavor coatings for edible extruded shapes. 'There are,' he says, 'a lot of parallels.'"

The Lobotomy Files

The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal uncovers documents showing lobotomies were performed on U.S. soldiers. They also uncover one of the soldiers.

"The VA’s practice, described in depth here for the first time, sometimes brought veterans relief from their inner demons. Often, however, the surgery left them little more than overgrown children, unable to care for themselves. Many suffered seizures, amnesia and loss of motor skills. Some died from the operation itself."

Beyond Recognition

The Verge

The story of Carmen Tarleton, the recipient of a face transplant, and the incredible doctors who made it possible

"Less than 24 hours later, at 5AM on February 14th, 2013, Carmen Tarleton was wheeled into an operating room at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA, for an experimental procedure that would replace her own scarred, mangled face with that of recently deceased 56-year-old Cheryl Denelli-Righter. If the surgeons succeeded, Tarleton would become just the seventh American patient to undergo a risky, experimental procedure known as a face transplant."

Tripping On Science

Dreamstime

Why Doctors Can't Give You LSD (But Maybe They Should)

Popular Science

There's a medical renaissance happening in psychedelics.

"Despite some promising results from trials of psychedelics in treating alcoholism, psychiatric conditions and modeling mental illness, by the early '70s, the government had tightened control of Schedule I substances, even for research. It's only now that we're starting to return to the notion that these drugs could be medicine."

NASA’s Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration

Wired

On the unexpected hurdle to space travel.

“Meaningful exploration of the solar system has been pushed to a cliff’s edge. One ambitious space mission could deplete remaining plutonium stockpiles, and any hiccup in a future supply chain could undermine future missions.”

The Child Exchange

Reuters

There's an underground, unregulated, unsanctioned adoption program lurking on the internet. Here's a deep dive into it.

"Reuters analyzed 5,029 posts from a five-year period on one Internet message board, a Yahoo group. On average, a child was advertised for re-homing there once a week. Most of the children ranged in age from 6 to 14 and had been adopted from abroad – from countries such as Russia and China, Ethiopia and Ukraine. The youngest was 10 months old."

Last Song For Migrating Birds

National Geographic

Novelist Jonathan Franzen on the slaughter of songbirds. 

"February 2012 brought eastern Europe its coldest weather in 50 years. Geese that normally winter in the Danube Valley flew south to escape it, and some 50,000 of them descended on the plains of Albania, starving and exhausted. Every one of them was exterminated."

How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets

The New York Times Magazine

Meeting Edward Snowden.

"I asked what was going on. He said: ‘You’re flagged. You have a threat score that is off the Richter scale. You are at 400 out of 400.’ I said, ‘Is this a scoring system that works throughout all of Europe, or is this an American scoring system?’ He said. ‘No, this is your government that has this and has told us to stop you.’”

Derailed

AP Photo/Aiken County (S.C.) Sheriff's Department

Derailed

Popular Science

How to prevent America's next train crash.

"Seven hours later, a second Norfolk Southern freight train—two locomotives, 25 loaded cars, and 17 empties—approached Graniteville at 49 miles an hour. The engineer expected to pass through at full speed. Instead, the open switch shot him onto the siding. He saw the parked train and tried to stop, but it was hopeless. Both locomotives and the first 16 cars of his train derailed; the engineer was killed. Three of the cars contained chlorine, a common industrial chemical; one of them sheared open."

All My Exes Live In Texts

New York

Why breakin' up is hard to do in the modern age.

"I carry the population of a metaphorical Texas in a cell phone on my person at all times. Etiquette can’t keep up with us—not that we would honor it anyway—so ex relationships run on lust and impulse and nosiness and envy alternating with fantasy. It’s a dozen soap operas playing at the same time on a dozen different screens, and you are the star of them all. It’s both as thrilling and as sickening as it sounds."

Do Some Harm

Aeon

Sorting the good from the quackery in traditional Chinese medicine.

"The combination of traditional medicine and hospital setting, of pseudoscience and life-saving treatment, might seem strange. But in modern China, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is not the realm of private enthusiasts, spiritual advisers or folk healers. It’s been institutionalised, incorporated into the state medical system, given full backing in universities, and is administered by the state."

How Doctors Die

Saturday Evening Post

On knowing how things will play out.

"Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right)."

F'd

War Is Boring

How the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter actually made us less safe.

"Which means that arguably the worst new jet fighter in the world, which one Australian military analyst-turned-politician claimed would be 'clubbed like baby seals' in combat, could soon also be America’s only new jet fighter."

On Eating Roadkill, The Most Ethical Meat

Modern Farmer

Guilt-free eating on the roadside.

"It is the perfect meat for vegetarians and vegans, too, provided their objections to meat are its murder or its environmental implications and not because it’s icky-gross. The animal was not raised for meat, it was not killed for meat; it is just simply and accidentally meat — manna from minivans."

Sniff Test

istockphoto.com & Iñaki Antoñana Plaza/Getty Images

Sniff Test

Popular Science

Can science build a bomb detector that's better than dogs?

"Suge is an adolescent black Labrador retriever in an orange DO NOT PET vest. He is currently a pupil at Auburn University's Canine Detection Research Institute and comes to the mall once a week to practice for his future job: protecting America from terrorists by sniffing the air with extreme prejudice."

Smog in Beijing

Berserkerus, via Wikimedia Commons

Old supercomputers don't die, they just get practical day jobs. China's Tianhe-1A, the fastest supercomputer in the world in 2011, is now being put to use tracking the terrifying and deadly clouds of pollution that come with burning almost as much coal as the rest of the world combined, according to a report from Xinhua, a state-owned media company.

Tianhe-1A will process data from 668 pollution monitoring points in 114 cities, and will hopefully alert people when it's time to stay inside. Smog has been so bad recently that Harbin, a city of 10 million in northeastern China, had to shut down schools and its airport. Shanghai, on China's eastern coast, warned the elderly and children against going outside for seven straight days, because of the harmful smog. In 2009, the World Health Organization estimated that premature death cost China $100 billion that year.

Forecasting the most dangerous days to be outdoors is a much more helpful move than claiming smog is beneficial to China, which the Global Times (another Chinese state media company) did on Monday. Such poor responses to the China's chronic pollution problem have provoked bitterly cynical responses. Earlier this year, a Chinese billionaire debuted a line of designer canned air, for the luxury of breathing and not dying.

[Tech in Asia]

Cold Front Pushes North China Smog Goes Into The Sea

NASA, MODIS Rapid Response System

Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-QX100

Sony

No matter how much smartphone engineers manage to shrink image sensors, they haven’t found a good way to downsize a quality lens, so images suffer. The QX100 is an entirely new approach to the cameraphone. The f/1.8 Carl Zeiss lens contains all the components of a high-end point-and-shoot—a full-frame 20-megapixel image sensor, a shutter, and an image processor—and attaches onto a smartphone, which serves as its viewfinder and memory. $500

Cabela's Colorphase Camouflage

Sam Kaplan

Cabela’s new ColorPhase Camouflage gives hunters chameleonlike powers. Depending on the ambient conditions, the dyes in the fabric’s foliage pattern will change colors—becoming greener during the early fall, when temperatures are above approximately 65^oF, and dull browns in late fall and winter. The camo could also be valuable on the battlefield, reducing the number of fatigue variations needed to conceal troops in different terrains. From $20

U.S. Navy/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Alvin

Kevin Hand

Since 1964, Alvin has made more than 4,600 career dives in pursuit of bombs, hydrothermal vents, and the wreck of the Titanic. Now, engineers at Woods Hole are filling the iconic submersible with 21st-century technology. The reborn Alvin will dive 1.2 miles deeper (to four miles), haul twice the scientific payload, and carry new sensors and instrumentation. It will open nearly the entire ocean to exploration and research.

I want what this dog is having.

Licensed under Creative Commons.

PearlsandaCardi via Flickr

Over the holidays, the British Medical Journal publishes a special edition, in which they "are pleased to consider all kinds of articles." All kinds, indeed. In this "narrative synthesis," the researchers attempt to answer the question "is laughter really the best medicine?" The short answer: not really, apparently. The study includes many interesting ways in which laughter is beneficial, as well as an odd list of harmful consequences. 

Researchers have been looking into this funny business for years, learning about laughing through the hard times, the evolutionary origins of laughter, how it affects pain thresholds, among other topics. But for this study, the researchers analyzed studies from two different journals dating back to 1946, controlling for scientists' names that include "laugh" (Laughton, or McLaughlin, for example.) They also removed irrelevant studies, including one paper called “Another exciting use for the cantaloupe.”

Some of the consequences of laughing included a dislocated jaw, incontinence, headaches, cardiac rupture, and in most serious circumstances, death. But that's not to say laughing is all bad—laughing can lead to improved lung functioning, higher energy, and even better odds of conception. The full study is really worth a read (warning: contains clowns)—just try not to giggle too much. 

Man Backs Away From Roar Of Subway Train, 1973

Erik Calonius, via Wikimedia Commons

In December of 2012, Ki Suk Han was fatally pushed onto the train tracks at Manhattan's 49th Street subway station. The New York Post rain a picture of Han on its front page, showing him moments before death, clinging to the edge of the platform as the arriving train barreled towards him. A new safety feature, which will be tested discreetly in one New York subway station, may help prevent future deaths like Han's.

Key to saving a person who's fallen onto subway tracks is detecting that they are there, and getting that information to train drivers as fast as possible. The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), responsible for New York's subways, is testing multiple sensors for the tracks. These include motion-sensor lasers, video-analyzing software, and infrared cameras. Whatever the sensor used, if it detects a body on the tracks, it will send a signal out to oncoming trains that stops them from pulling into station.

Given that the MTA has $250 billion in debt, the implementation of such a system may be challenging. But even unimproved, subways remain a very safe way to travel, about 17 times as safe as driving a car. And in 2011, people killed by subways accounted for just one quarter of one percent of all traffic fatalities in the United States. It's exciting that the MTA is working on a way to reduce subway deaths to an even lower level (and they are using lasers to do it!). But given that 35 percent of all traffic fatalities in 2011 involved cars, 25 percent trucks, 13 percent motorcycles, and 13 more percent pedestrians struck by motor vehicles, perhaps the money and time might be better spent, and might save more lives, if it goes instead towards making streets safer for pedestrians, bikes, and even cars themselves.

[via The Verge]

Go To Jail

Dreamstime

A prison escapee convicted of killing a vacationing couple in their 60s—for their trailer, according to a newspaper from the couple’s hometown—recently dodged the death penalty for his crime. Instead, John McCluskey, 45, will serve life in prison without parole. What may have swayed the jury against the death penalty were brain scans the defense presented, Wired reports. The scans showed that parts of their client’s brain responsible for planning and controlling behavior were smaller than usual, among other abnormalities.

In recent years, judges and juries have seen more and more high-tech brain scans appear in court cases, NPR reports. Usually they’re used to argue defendants can’t bear full responsibility for their crimes because their brains are immature or impaired. For some scientists, this is troubling. “You can't leap from a dynamic brain scan to notions of responsibility,” Nigel Eastman, who studies law and ethics in psychiatry at the University of London, told the U.K.’s The Guardian in November.

There’s also evidence brain scans sway juries unduly, even compared to other scientific visual evidence such as charts and graphs. And they can appear in controversial cases: Attorneys have used them to argue against the death penalty in other violent murder cases. (Though it’s not always clear, unless jurors say so, how much of an impact brain scans have on any one case.) About 5 percent of murder trials now draw on neuroscience, NPR reports.

Wired took a closer look at the neuroscience in McCluskey’s trial using court documents and an interview with a neuroscientist who followed the proceedings. You can check out the argument for both sides over at Wired. McCluskey’s defense argued that changes to his brain indicate he has a hard time planning and controlling his emotions and behavior. Meanwhile, the prosecution presented evidence McCluskey could still plan, from running a drug circle in prison to planning his own escape. 

Reindeer

Alexandre Buisse via Wikimedia Commons

Summer sea ice in the Arctic got a respite this year, as did the Greenland ice sheet, because cooler summer temperatures prevented a repeat of 2012's record-setting melt. But the past seven summers have seen the lowest amounts of Arctic sea ice since satellite records began in 1979.

These and other environmental conditions in the Arctic are detailed in the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration's (NOAA) annual “Arctic Report Card,” which the agency released Thursday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Overall, it's been “another year in the new normal,” said Army Corps of Engineers geophysicist Don Perovich, a contributor to the report. Scientists like Perovich are struggling to figure out what the new baselines are, as warming transforms the region. By September, when the 2013 summer melt ended, Arctic sea ice coverage was at its sixth lowest extent since 1979. During the summer, melting took place on about 44 percent of the surface of the Greenland ice sheet—smaller than 2013 historic 97 percent, although not particularly low compared to the long-term record.

In March 2013, multi-year thick sea ice made up just 7 percent of the Arctic ice cap, and first-year ice comprised about 78 percent, compared to 26 percent and 58 percent respectively in March 1988. “Younger” sea ice does not reflect as much solar radiation back into the atmosphere, intensifying warming trends caused by human-propelled climate change.

Multi-year sea ice is vanishing in the Arctic. In March 2013, only 7 percent of the ice cover was thick sea ice, compared to 26 percent in March 1988. Younger, thinner ice cover does not reflect as much heat back into the atmosphere as "old" ice, amplifying Arctic warming trends.

NOAA Climate.gov/Mark Tschudi

Temperatures split into unusual warm and cool extremes over different Arctic regions during the spring and summer. Just below the Arctic Circle, Fairbanks, Alaska, had 36 days at or warmer than 80 degrees F, a new record, while Central Alaska had its coldest April since 1924. May snow cover in Eurasia was at a historic low this year, with temperatures about 7 degrees F. higher than in the past. Spring and early summer snow cover across the North American Arctic was the fourth lowest on record.

Arctic land is “greening,” as warmer temperatures have gradually extended the growing season by nine days for each decade since record-keeping started in 1982. But as plant life increases and the climate becomes warmer and drier, wildfires are burning more frequently. More study is needed to figure out how these fires may affect the amount of soot, or "black carbon," in the Arctic. Black carbon, created by the incomplete burning of fossil fuels or biomass, absorbs solar radiation. In the atmosphere, black carbon can increase temperatures; landing on snow or ice, it can accelerate melting. Levels of black carbon being carried to the Arctic by global winds have roughly halved since the early 1990s, when the economic contraction of the former Soviet Union cut industrial activity.

Migratory Arctic tundra caribou and reindeer herds have diminished over the past several years, according to the report. While smaller winter ranges may play a part, the decreases may also involve natural populations shifts, according to Michael Svoboda, of the Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Program. If so, both species may bounce back in coming years despite the changing environment.

Growing numbers of musk oxen, meanwhile, are largely thanks to active conservation and re-introduction programs, Svoboda said.

Current status of 24 major migratory tundra reindeer and caribou herds

NOAA Climate.gov/ Don Russell

Long-term warming continues to push Atlantic cod, capelin, salmon, and other fish species northward. The report recommends that scientists start monitoring and assessing fish populations in deeper waters further north, to figure out whether and how they are adapting to climate change. This year's report card did not include data on polar bears or other marine mammals.

There is growing evidence that the Arctic's new normal is driving changing weather patterns in lower hemispheres. “The Arctic is not like Vegas,” said University of Virginia ecologist Howie Epstein, another report contributor. “What happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic.” Scientists still don't fully understand how these systems interact, however, highlighting how much about the region is still a mystery.

Parting a bit from the straight science, the researchers presenting the report card went out of their way to mention that government funding shortfalls are forcing reductions in Arctic monitoring systems. “We need to be better prepared for the increasing level of activity in the Arctic,” said Martin Jeffries of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, a science adviser for U.S. Arctic Research Commission. “If we can't see what's going on, we can't be prepared” for what the new level of human activity in the warming Arctic will bring, from rescues to oil spills.

The Arctic is a “data-sparse region, just as we need to better understand and model that system," said Perovich, "to predict what will happen in the future.”

Pneumatic Tube Delivery System in the Basement of the New York Life Insurance Building

Popular Science, January 1930

A restaurant in Christchurch, New Zealand, plans to install a pneumatic tube system for delivering sliders and a “wee packet of chips—um, fries,” as chef Richie Ward explained in a video.

The food, which will come enclosed in stainless steel capsules, will go barreling through the tubes at 87 miles per hour (140 kilometers per hour). Air brakes will slow the capsules to a safer speed before they drop down from above patrons’ tables, or rise up from below the tabletop, depending on the location of the table. The whole system will take a year to install and test, New Zealand’s The Press reports.

Our favorite thing about this story is that it could have appeared in any given issue of Popular Science published over, oh, the last 130 years or so. Our predecessors loved pneumatic tubes. In 1874, Popular Science published a description of London’s Pneumatic Dispatch “for the conveyance of small parcels of goods from place to place.” A 1949 feature on Brookhaven National Laboratory’s nuclear reactor includes diagrams of its pneumatic tube system. And in 1930, the magazine published a feature about pneumatic tubes used for transporting everything from coal to wheat to mail. (You can still see those now-dormant mail systems in older New York City office buildings; at the time, they were new.)

Surely past Popular Science editors would have loved a tube burger-delivery system. After all, they were into futuristic eating/cooking schemes, too. Witness this 1921 report on a slot-machine restaurant, or the burger-making timesavers the magazine has published over the years.

Mosaic on Titan

NASA-ESA

Elongated lakes and seas connected by long skinny peninsulas characterise the two seas picked out in the new image. Reminiscent of the topographic depressions in the basin and range province of USA, shaped by the movements of tectonic plates on America’s western fringe, there are suggestions that the large lakes seen on Titan may be tectonically shaped-seas.

“Scientists have been wondering why Titan’s lakes are where they are. These images show us that the bedrock and geology must be creating a particularly inviting environment for lakes,” said Randolph Kirk, a Cassini RADAR team member at the US Geological Survey. “We think it may be something like the formation of the prehistoric lake called Lake Lahontan near Lake Tahoe in Nevada and California, where deformation of the crust created fissures that could be filled up with liquid.”

Scientists described the observations of huge polar lakes called Ligeia and Kraken on Titan, at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union here in San Francisco today, the world’s largest gathering of Earth scientists.

Alongside the two large liquid bodies picked out so clearly, there is a myriad of smaller lakes that are seen scattered around the pole of Titan. Their origins are unclear, with speculations ranging from volcanic crater lakes to giant sinkholes formed in dissolved Titan crust.

Marco Mastrogiuseppe from Sapienza University, Rome, described the results from RADAR imaging of the fluid bodies at Titan’s surface. “For the first time we were able to observe the topography of the subsurface of an extraterrestrial sea”, he explained.

Cassini’s RADAR has charted the areas of the lakes and seas near the pole, but has also bounced signals off the lake beds in the first depth soundings of an extraterrestrial sea.

“Ligeia Mare turned out to be just the right depth for radar to detect a signal back from the sea floor, which is a signal we didn’t think we’d be able to get,” said Mastrogiuseppe. A maximum depth of around 170 meters, similar to Lake Michigan, was found, and the lake was crystal clear to RADAR eyes.

The total volume of Ligeia is put at 9000 cubic kilometres and it is filled not with water, but with hydrocarbon fluids. The total volume of the hydrocarbon Titanic seas corresponds to around 300 times that of Earth’s oil reserves, in a celestial body smaller than Earth.

The RADAR reflectivity suggests that the lakes are mainly filled with methane alongside a few other heavier hydrocarbon fluids. These include ethane and nitrogen. Alongside Ligiea sits another sea, Kraken. Comparable in size to the Caspian Sea here on Earth, Kraken is four or more times the area of Ligeia. Cassini will return to carry out bathometry of it in August 2014.

Jeffrey Kargel, from the University of Arizona Tucson, pointed out that the presence of extensive methane seas and lakes at Titan’s north pole makes worse a long acknowledged deficiency of heavier hydrocarbons expected from models of Titan’s chemistry. Among them are ethane, ethylene, propylene, acetylene and benzene - heavy hydrocarbons generated as sunlight causes chemical reactions in Titan’s soup of natural gas. Using visual imaging instruments Cassini has revealed that Titan has a northern polar cap larger than Greenland.

Bright deposits around the lakes show the nature of the solid surface. In a world that is difficult to imagine, crystallised heavy hydrocarbons form Titan’s crust, with suggestions of huge dune fields of solid hydrocarbon sand around the equator. While these equatorial “rocks” are saturated in ethane the polar regions appear to be made of methane.

We are now close to summer solstice on Saturn, and Titan has weather that changes with the seasons. Giant storms arise on Saturn, with jets of gas seen shooting from the south pole of cousin moon, Enceladus. A fly-by is planned in 2015 in which Cassini will fly through these plumes and take a closer look at Enceladus’ north pole.

Cassini is now in a set of intricate complicated orbits. Only 4% of its propulsion is left, and future fly-bys are largely powered by the gravitational fields of Saturn and its moons. The probe’s final journey, planned for September 2017 will skirt Saturn’s innermost ring and touch her atmosphere before finally succumbing to the giant planet’s grasp.

Simon Redfern does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

The robotic arm of the ROV “Doc Ricketts” uses a “push core” to sample sediment from underneath the shipping container as a large crab observes.

Chad King MBMNS/NOAA

Scientists at the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary are in the midst of an ecology cruise. The team has set sail to explore a shipping container that was lost from a cargo ship during a storm in 2004. At the same time, 23 other containers also went missing, but their whereabouts are still unknown. 

Back in 2011, researchers used an ROV to assess the ecological impact of the container, finding that the intruder created an adverse effect to life on the seafloor, in an area that's 20 times its size. (They also produced a short documentary about it.) This particular container sits about 4,200 feet below the surface, and takes an ROV about an hour to descend to.

Starting earlier this week, MBNMS took another dive to further assess the container and the sea life around it. So far, the Montery Bay Aquarium Research Institute's ROV, named Doc Ricketts, has provided important imagery and samples, allowing researchers to compare the way the sea life has changed from 2004, to 2011, and to 2013. Another mission priority includes understanding more about any potential toxic effects of the containers' peeling paint.

"Our initial anecdotal impressions are that the container has more and new life growing on it than it did in 2011," writes NOAA research specialist, Chad King. "Since many colonies of bacteria dine on sulfides, we are curious if sulfide compounds are leaching out of the container, which apparently contains 1,200 steel-belted Michelin tires. The original rumor was that the container was full of expensive French wine. If that were true, perhaps we would have opened the doors today!"

You can follow along for more updates on Twitter and on the blog.

Martin Aircraft Company P12 Jetpack

Martin Aircraft Company

63 miles per hour: the speed of the P12 Jetpack, a personal flight device that can reach 8,000 feet

50 hours: the time it took electrical engineer Chris Fenton to build this 3-D printed, hand-cranked calculator that uses punch cards, string, and rubber bands to execute functions (video)

3-D Printed Computer

Dan Bracaglia

2018: the year private spaceflight project Mars One hopes an exploratory lander and satellite will arrive at Mars, in preparation for a human colony

Mars One 2018 Lander Concept Art

Bryan Versteeg and Mars One

1,000 millisieverts: the amount of radiation astronauts on Mars would be exposed to if they stayed for 500 days (that's more than 10 times as much radiation as an astronaut receives during six months aboard the International Space Station)

$40 billion: the cost of the Federal Aviation Administration's transition from a ground-based, radar-based air traffic control system to a satellite-based system called NextGen

FACET

An image of airplane traffic from the simulation tool FACET.

Juan Alonso

2014: the year the U.S. Navy is set to debut a system that fires directed energy weapons at drone sensors to fry their electronics

Kratos Defense & Security Solutions Laser Weapon System

U.S. Navy

25 cents: the price per board foot of Mushroom Insulation, a compostable material with the benefits of foam board insulation but none of the petrochemicals, VOCs, or fire retardants

$42,000: the funding two scientists hope to raise via Indiegogo in order to distribute kits that would allow anyone to test leaves, twigs, insects, and fungi as candidate antibiotic sources

ILIAD Project Petri Dish and Instructions

Screenshot from “The ILIAD Project Indiegogo Video” on YouTube

785: the number of studies included in a recent analysis of the dangers of laughter, which include jaw dislocation, incontinence, cardiac rupture, and death

$89: the price of a DIY digital camera kit for kids

BigShot Camera Kit

Elenco

10: the number of pennies you need to make a battery that powers an LED holiday light for two weeks

Wii Fit Plus Model with a Screenshot

As you might already know, playing Wii Fit is a funny thing. It feels kind of like cheating—because aren’t I supposed to be grunting it out at the gym or something?—but it is also genuinely fatiguing. Now a new study suggests it’s no cop-out. In a randomized controlled trial, older adults with type 2 diabetes had better controlled blood sugar after playing Wii Fit Plus for half an hour a day, every day, for 12 weeks.

They also lost some weight—a little more than a kilogram, on average—and lowered their body mass indices slightly. Their blood sugar level reductions were on par with study participants who received the “standard care” doctors normally give people with diabetes, the U.K.’s National Health Service reports.

This is encouraging because getting set up to play Wii Fit Plus is cheaper than other forms of diabetes care, National Health Service reports. Plus, I’m guessing there’s little danger of negative side effects. One major drawback of the study is that people had trouble following the routine, which may have biased the results, for example if the dropouts left because they weren’t seeing any good effects. Out of the 220 volunteers researchers recruited for the study, one-third eventually dropped out, the BBC reports.

The National Health Service has a good breakdown of the study, which is one of the first to so rigorously examine the health benefits of active video games. The bottom line is that there’s evidence playing Wii Fit Plus daily can help those with type 2 diabetes, though it’s not exactly a proven treatment yet.

The research was published in the journal BMC Endocrine Disorders.

[NHS, BBC]

Ford 1.0-Liter EcoBoost

Ford

With three cylinders and less than one liter of displacement, Ford’s EcoBoost is smaller than many motorcycle engines. Yet it still produces 123 horsepower and 148 pound-feet of torque. Direct injection, variable-valve timing, and a turbocharger that spins at a lofty 248,000 rpm allow higher engine pressures and more complete combustion, which squeezes more energy from each drop of fuel. As a result, the new EcoBoost is even more powerful than the larger engine it’s replacing: the 1.6-liter four-cylinder in the Ford Fiesta hatchback. Fuel consumption should improve to 41 mpg or more on the highway. $17,500 (est.)

China’s Chang’e 3 spacecraft landed on the surface of the moon Saturday night, Beijing time. The craft is China’s first to land on the surface of the moon. This is a video of the landing, taken by cameras installed on Chang’e 3. At first, you'll see the lunar landscape unspooling beneath you, then around 5:30 in the video, the craft finally chooses a landing spot, hovers, and descends.

If you're under 37, this is the first time in your life a spacecraft has sent images from the moon's surface to Earth.

Chang’e 3 ultimately didn’t land in the spot engineers said they were aiming for when they blasted off. But, American planetary scientist Paul Spudis blogged, this location is actually more geologically interesting than the original planned landing site. There is a relatively young lava flow there that Chang’e 3’s rover, Yutu, could study. Yutu has already activated five of its eight scientific instruments, the state-owned newspaper Xinhua reports, and started testing the lunar soil.

China's next plans are for craft, Chang'e 5 and Chang'e 6, that will be able to not only land on the moon, but also scoop up some samples and return again to Earth, Xinhua reports. Chang'e 4 is a backup for Chang'e 3.