A new van Leeuwenhoek is born!

Or should I say a group of them!  He used his ground lenses to look into a drop of water and saw a new world completely unknown at the time.  Antarctic scientists just repeated the same experiment on a far grander scale. See the report here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100315/ap_on_sc/us_sci_antarctica_sea_life

One More Great Leap Forward

eSolar strikes deal to build power plants in China

Reuters – A view shows the "Sunny Valley", a structure to harness solar energy, at the 2010 Shanghai …

By CARA ANNA, Associated Press Writer Cara Anna, Associated Press Writer – Sat Jan 9, 7:15 am ET

BEIJING – A U.S. solar power company said Saturday it will help build a series of solar thermal power plants in China, as the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases tries to decrease its heavy reliance on coal, imported gas and oil. California-based eSolar Inc. will provide Shandong Penglai Electric Power Equipment Manufacturing Co. with the technology and information to build the concentrated solar thermal power farms with a capacity totaling 2,000 megawatts. The $5 billion investment would be the largest such project in China, though the companies didn't say who would be investing how much. "This is a huge jump for China," said Deborah Seligsohn, director of the China climate program for the U.S-based World Resources Institute. "That amount suggests a number of commercial plants." Interest in China as a solar energy market is growing quickly as the government looks for alternatives to coal. Saturday's deal comes four months after the largest solar panel maker in the U.S., First Solar, struck a tentative deal to build a massive solar field in China. The eSolar deal is for concentrated solar thermal power — not the traditional image of vast farms of solar panels, but a system of taking what essentially are mirrors and focusing them to heat water to create steam to power a generator. "There's room in the world for both systems, and we need both," Seligsohn said. China is moving much faster than the U.S. in solar power development, eSolar officials said. "This is an excellent example of what we all must do to fight climate change," Merrick Kerr, eSolar's chief financial officer, told a news conference Saturday in Beijing. The first solar plant under the deal will be in Yulin city in the central province of Shaanxi. China has set ambitious goals for solar and other renewable energy in an effort to clean up its environment and curb surging demand for imported oil and gas, which communist leaders see as a strategic weakness. Late last year, legislators approved changes to China's 2006 renewable energy law saying utilities will be required to buy all the power produced by wind farms and other renewable sources in an effort to reduce heavy reliance on coal. Government goals issued in 2005 call for at least 15 percent of China's power to come from wind, solar and hydropower by 2020, up from 9 percent now. Officials say that target may be raised to 20 percent because the industry is developing so quickly. Coal, however, provides two-thirds of China's power and is expected to remain the dominant energy source in coming years. China is the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and is not bound by global agreements on curbing emissions because it is a developing economy. But the State Council, or China's Cabinet, has promised to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide for each unit of economic output by 40 percent to 45 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.

Formula Predicts Animal Density in American River Valleys

A fascinating study with tremendous value if the author's conclusion proves true through successive studies.  This study analyzes life in American river valleys over time and the author develops a mathematical formula to explain that ebb and flow.   Why is this important?  Since his formula only uses the physical size and shape of the valley, if it works for both warm and cold climates, it may be extendable to other planets to predict whether similar type valleys on those planets once harbored life.   This would save time and money in further planetary exploration or even further exploration into remote regions of our own planet.  A more detailed review is below.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090722/sc_livescience/formulafoundtoexplainearthsevenlyspacedvalleys

LHC Belches to Life Once Again

After a year of repairs (original damage estimates were way off the mark), le machine grande de collision aka the greatest atom smasher of them all, finally belched to life once again.   It is now through its initial tests and is building up a  head of steam to find that elusive Higgs.    Here’s hoping the search is both short and fruitful.
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2009/PR16.09E.html

Art Bell Got One Right

Earth could plunge into sudden ice age

Experts: ‘Big Freeze’ about 12,800 years ago happened within months

20th Century Fox The film "The Day After Tomorrow" was all good fiction when it came out in 2004, but now scientists are finding eerie truths to the possibilities of sudden temperature swings.

By Charles Q. Choi

Special to LiveScience

updated 12:03 p.m. PT, Wed., Dec . 2, 2009

In the film, "The Day After Tomorrow," the world gets gripped in ice within the span of just a few weeks. Now research now suggests an eerily similar event might indeed have occurred in the past.

Looking ahead to the future, there is no reason why such a freeze shouldn't happen again — and in ironic fashion it could be precipitated ifongoing changes in climate force the Greenland ice sheet to suddenly melt, scientists say.

Starting roughly 12,800 years ago, the Northern Hemisphere was gripped by a chill that lasted some 1,300 years. Known by scientists as the Younger Dryas and nicknamed the"Big Freeze," geological evidence suggests it was brought on when a vast pulse of fresh water — a greater volume than all of North America's Great Lakes combined — poured into the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.

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This abrupt influx, caused when the glacial Lake Agassiz in North America burst its banks, diluted the circulation of warmer water in the North Atlantic, bringing this "conveyer belt" to a halt. Without this warming influence, evidence shows that temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere plummeted.

No time to react
Previous evidence from Greenland ice samples had suggested thisabrupt shift in climate happened over the span of a decade or so. Now researchers say it surprisingly may have taken place over the course of a few months, or a year or two at most.

"That the climate system can turn on and off that quickly is extremely important," said earth system scientist Henry Mullins at Syracuse University, who did not take part in this research. "Once the tipping point is reached, there would be essentially no opportunity for humans to react."

For two years, isotope biogeochemist William Patterson at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada and his colleagues investigated a mud core — a tube of mud — taken from the ancient lake Lough Monreach in Ireland. Because this sediment was deposited slowly over time, each layer from this core effectively represents a snapshot of history, with slices just a half-millimeter thick presenting one to three months.

"Basically, I drive around in western Ireland looking for the right conditions — bedrock, vegetation and lake — to obtain the most complete record of climate," Patterson explained.

The details

INTERACTIVE The accuracy of 10 disaster flicks

By looking at isotopes of carbon in each slice, the researchers could deduce how productive the lake was. When plants grow in lakes, they prefer carbon-12 to make up their organic tissue — that is, carbon atoms that have 12 protons and neutrons in total in their nucleus. This leaves the lake water with relatively more carbon-13. At thesame time, oxygen isotopes give a picture of temperature — when animals or plants produce calcium carbonate, the ratio of oxygen-16 and oxygen-18 isotopes within are related to temperature.

At the start of the Younger Dryas, Patterson and his colleagues discovered temperatures and lake productivity dropped over the course of just a few years.

"It would be like taking Ireland today and moving it up to above the Arctic Circle, creating icy conditions in a very short period of time," Patterson said.

Their findings also suggest that it may have taken 100 to 200 years before the lake and climate recovered, rather than the decade or so that Greenland ice cores had indicated.

"This makes sense because it would take time for the ocean and atmospheric circulation to turn on again," Patterson said.

The discrepancies between the evidence from the mud core and the ice cores might be due to disturbances in how material flowed within the ice. "Sometimes there's melting, and you have percolation of material between layers, which can blur the records," Patterson explained. "We found a core that had not been disturbed even on a millimeter by millimeter basis, so the sediment had been layered in order since it was deposited."

Chilly future
Looking ahead to the future, Patterson said there was no reason why a big freeze shouldn't happen again.

"If the Greenland ice sheet melted suddenly it would becatastrophic," he said.

This kind of scenario would not discount evidence pointing toward global warming — after all, it leans on the Greenland ice sheet melting.

"We could say that global warming could lead to a dramatic cooling," Patterson told LiveScience. "This should serve as a further warning rather than a pass."

"People assume that we're political, that we're either pro-global-warming or anti-global-warming, when it's really neither," Patterson added. "Our goal is just to understand climate."

Patterson and his colleagues detailed their findings at the European Science Foundation BOREAS conference on humans in the Arctic, in Rovaniemi, Finland.

© 2009 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.

Kepler Mission

NASA's Kepler Telescope asks a question: Can we identify Earth-like planets with atmospheres suitable for life?

Kepler cost $500M financec by one government (US-NASA);

On August 6 of this year, 2 months after launch, NASA's Kepler telescope proved itself to be the best scientific experiment since the Hubble Space Telescope was launched. It was conceived in the late 80s as a wild shot in the dark. Could we design an instrument so sensitive that it could detect the atmosphere of an Earth-sized exoplanet light years away. The head honchos at NASA immediately laughed it off as so impossible that it wasnt worthy of their ridicule. Within one month of being turned on, Kepler detected the atmosphere of a large exoplanet 1000 light years away. Will we see this planet in our lifetimes? Don't hold your breath. But even that detection was never even imagined. Suddenly, the impossible became intriguing. Equally important was that it proved that not only was it the most light-sensitive instrument ever designed and built, but also that BIG science can be done on a relatively tiny budget (500M compared to the Bs spent on the LHC by multiple countries or the Space Station), and still produce high value results. All without putting anyone at risk.
Beyond all this, when one reads the background of the mission founder, this little experiment shows that the moral of never quitting when you know you're right is as true today as it ever was.  Read the entire story at http://kepler.nasa.gov/about/ and updates on the project at http://kepler.nasa.gov/about/manager.html.