This summer, Microsoft is launching a new green energy initiative in which all of the company's direct operations, "including data centers, software development labs, air travel, and office buildings," will go carbon neutral.
The program will begin in July, at the start of Microsoft's 2013 fiscal year, and includes a company-wide carbon fee, whereby various divisions will be held accountable for their own energy usage.
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The world inhabited by dinosaurs was typically a hot one, with high levels of greenhouse gasses, lots of water vapor, and no permanent ice sheets. And, according to a new estimate published in the journal Current Biology, the dinosaurs themselves may have contributed to their hothouse conditions.
(Note to the editors of Current BIology: I'm not sure that the Jurassic really qualifies as "current.")
A team of British researchers has put together various estimates of the features of the Jurassic's large herbivores, such as population density, typical body mass, and so on. Combined with an estimate of how much methane is emitted by a typical herbivore, these numbers suggest that the dinosaurs were pouring out enough methane to help the greenhouse effect keep the Earth nice and toasty.
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Prior to this spring, the Heartland Institute was a relatively obscure think tank that was primarily known for organizing an annual conference of people who take issue with mainstream climate science. That changed when an environmental researcher tricked the group into sending him internal documents, setting off a public drama that ended up leaving both parties worse off (Heartland lost sponsors, while the researcher had to resign a number of his positions).
Apparently, the experience left Heartland craving more public controversy, and it responded with what can best be described as a bit of trolling. In advance of this year's climate-skeptic conference, Heartland paid for a billboard that showed a picture of the Unabomber accompanied by the text "I still believe in Global Warming. Do You?" In a press release, Heartland said future iterations would feature Charles Manson, Fidel Castro, and possibly Osama bin Laden.
Instead, the campaign was stopped after 24 hours as prominent conference speakers threatened to cancel and a number of the Institute's financial backers threatened to depart.
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Much to the chagrin of California tourism promoters, smog is likely one of the things you picture when you think about the city of Los Angeles. The haze of pollutants that often hangs over the region is more than just an eyesore; it's a source of considerable respiratory stress. And where does that air pollution come from? Smokestacks, tailpipes, and cows. You read that right—cows. In fact, a new study estimates that cows contribute at least as much as automobiles.
There are two main factors that control the formation of smog. The first is the air pollution. This includes a range of volatile organic compounds, as well as oxides of nitrogen (referred to as NOx compounds). These pollutants react in sunlight to produce the ground-level ozone that triggers asthma advisories. The second necessary condition is stagnant air. A stiff breeze moving through the city will clear away pollution before it can collect. Areas that experience smog typically have the right topographical and meteorological conditions for air masses to hang around for a while.
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Drafts of new regulations relating to hydraulic fracturing in natural gas production were released for public comment Friday. This follows on the heels of the new rules for air emissions released two weeks ago. The US Environmental Protection Agency announced new guidance for obtaining permits when diesel fuel is included as a component of the fracking fluid used to fracture source rocks and free the gas trapped inside. As we laid out in a previous story, a 2005 amendment to the Safe Drinking Water Act exempted fracking from regulation as an underground injection, except when diesel fuel is used. Despite that caveat, the industry continued using diesel fuel without reporting it, saying that the EPA had never explicitly provided a process for them to do so. That process is now laid out in the new guidance. This may become a moot point, however, as public pressure is forcing the industry to move to more innocuous alternatives.
The US Department of the Interior also announced new rules for fracking on federal and Indian land, greatly increasing oversight. Fracking must now be explicitly approved as part of the normal drilling permits companies apply for when operating on federal land. This will require them to submit details on the layers of rock they plan to frack and how they will manage and dispose of the spent fracking fluids. They will also have to submit documentation of tests performed to ensure integrity of the seal around the well before the actual fracking begins. After the process is complete, drillers will have to publicly disclose the chemicals used in the fracking fluid.
In the press release, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar says, “As we continue to offer millions of acres of America’s public lands for oil and gas development, it is critical that the public have full confidence that the right safety and environmental protections are in place. The proposed rule will modernize our management of well stimulation activities—including hydraulic fracturing—to make sure that fracturing operations conducted on public and Indian lands follow common-sense industry best practices.”
Several states (most notably Wyoming and Texas) already have some similar requirements on the books, and others may use the federal rules as a template in the future. The drafts of both the EPA guidance and DOI rules will be revised and finalized following the 60 day public comment period.
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I thought I didn't like you, but then you mentioned the Supreme Court: Atheists are some of the least trusted members of society, consistently coming in last in polls that ask whether you'd vote for a hypothetical presidential candidate that had certain features. Now, researchers have figured out a way to make atheists a touch more appealing: prime people with thoughts of trusted secular authorities. This didn't eliminate the bias against atheists, but it did seem to reduce it a bit.
Buckyballs as a fabricated fountain of youth: The fullerenes are spherical cages of carbon atoms, the most common containing 60 of them. Their distinctive chemical properties have led to their use for a variety of materials, including a number in which they'll end up in contact with the human body—in a few cases, ingested as drugs. Various studies have shown that fullerenes are nontoxic when the exposure is brief, so one lab decided to give some rats a repeated dose of the fullerene and see what happens. Surprisingly, they report, the rats lived twice as long as their control peers, even though the fullerene was cleared within a couple of days.
That result may be weird, but there's something else fishy about the experiments. Derek Lowe, who first blogged about the results, saw his eagle-eyed readers dive into the paper, and come up with a bit of a problem. Two figures, meant to represent different data, actually turned out to be different views of the same sample. This could be an innocuous mistake but, as Lowe notes, it doesn't exactly give you confidence in the paper. So, best not to fry up your pork chops with buckyballs just yet.
Studying the past using a giant tower of bird poop: This is a way to reconstruct that past that only a faculty member with some expendable grad students would love: a large, unused tower that had been occupied by chimney swifts for decades, recording their history through the equivalent of sedimentary layers at the bottom. Except the sediment is bird poop. The authors could track the arrival of DDT and the changes it created in the insect populations eaten by the swifts using that 50-year record.
Maybe we should see how yeast respond to Viagra, too: Zoloft is an antidepressant that targets a signaling pathway used by nerve cells. Yeast have no nerve cells (more accurately, yeast are single cells that don't happen to be nerves). Yet, dump Zoloft on yeast, and it triggers significant changes, probably through altering the internal membranes of the yeast. All of which has some pretty serious implications, since the drug may be doing similar things in humans.
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Things were hot for this week's science news, with solar eruptions, local heating driven by wind farms, and the test firing of a rocket. But there were also plans to keep things cool, via floating windmills and an examination of the idea of buying up fossil fuel extraction rights, then not extracting them. Meanwhile, nearly a decade after its planned 90-day drive on Mars was done, one of NASA's rovers is still sending back valuable scientific data.
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Planets as small as Earth are hard to spot orbiting other stars; obtaining good data about their chemical composition is well beyond the abilities of our current instruments. However, a new study of four white dwarfs provides hints about the fate of planets like our own. It's not an especially happy one, as the astronomers found that the chemical composition of debris on the white dwarfs closely matches that of Earth.
These observations, which will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, focused on four "polluted" white dwarfs, which have traces of elements not usually seen in this type of star. B. T. Gänsicke et al. studied their ultraviolet spectrum using the Hubble Space Telescope, and determined they contained excessive amounts of silicon, aluminum, iron, and other elements, with abundances similar to those found on Earth. These results indicate that rocky debris has crashed onto the white dwarfs—debris that may possibly be from the destruction of a planet similar in composition to Earth.
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There's been a growing push to get more scientific research out from behind paywalls. The federal government, private funding bodies, and a number of research institutions have all adopted policies that either mandate or encourage placing papers where the public can view them. Now, it appears that the UK is considering following suit. In addition to planning to make its researchers' publications available, the country's science minister has asked Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales to advise it on how to make the underlying data accessible.
The announcements came in a speech by David Willetts, the UK's Minister of State for Universities and Science. Willets was pretty blunt about access to government-funded research, saying, "As taxpayers put their money towards intellectual inquiry, they cannot be barred from then accessing it."
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A new electrode material could help make lightweight, powerful rechargeable sodium batteries to replace lithium-ion batteries used in electronics and some electric vehicles. The material contains widely available iron, instead of the nickel and cobalt commonly used in these electrodes, and enables a similar energy density to electrodes in lithium batteries.
Sodium is an attractive candidate to replace lithium in batteries because it’s cheaper and widely available around the world. But building a sodium battery requires redesigning battery technology to accommodate the chemical reactivity and larger size of sodium atoms.
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