Obama on Apollo 11 and crew

Is it just me, or do the astronauts look really uptight (especially Neil)?

Past the point of no return?

This is probably accurate:

In fact, there is a perfectly good reason developing countries are unwilling to act on climate change: What they are being asked to do is more awful than climate change’s implications–even if one accepts all the alarmist predictions.

Consider what would be necessary to slash global greenhouse-gas emissions just 50% below 2000 levels by 2050–a far less aggressive goal than what the enviros say is necessary to avert climate catastrophe. According to U.S. Chamber of Commerce calculations, even if the West reduced its emissions by 80% below 2000 levels, developing countries would still have to return their emissions to 2000 levels to meet the 50% target. However, Indians currently consume roughly 15 times less energy per capita than Americans–and Chinese consume seven times less. Asking them, along with the rest of the developing world, to go back to 2000 emission levels with a 2050 population would mean putting them on a very drastic energy diet.

The human toll of this is unfathomable: It would require these countries to abandon plans to ever conquer poverty, of course. But beyond that it would require a major scaling back of living standards under which their middle classes–for whom three square meals, cars and air-conditioning are only now beginning to come within reach–would have to go back to subsistence living, and the hundreds of millions who are at subsistence would have to accept starvation.

I think I may agree with this point: we are too far down the slippery-slope of climate-change for curbing consumption to be enough to effectively combat the changes. We might be past the point of no-return here.

To avoid calamity, I believe we will need a technological revolution (coming in the form of a multi-front effort to increase carbon-free energy production, geo-engineering global cooling efforts, &c.).

But what we can do with consumption-curbing efforts is buy ourselves more time. If we can slow the pace of warming, we increase the chances of finding technological resources to help our efforts.

Her conclusion, which essentially amounts to sitting on our hands, is utterly backwards and false:

So what should climate warriors do? Right now the only certain way to save lives is by calling off this misguided war on climate change. If and when climate change promises to claim more casualties than poverty and starvation, the world will begin heeding their calls. If, however, these climate-change casualties don’t materialize, there would have been no need to act in the first place. Either way, the world has far more immediate and scarier problems than climate change to address right now.

We cannot abandon pushes to slow/stop climate change. That is suicide. To say we have to stop all efforts on this huge issue because there are other huge issues going on in the world simultaneously, is both misguided and cowardly. We can rub our stomach and pat our head at the same time–and in this case, we need to.

The real issue here is a failure to acknowledge that, going forward, our economy and our environmental policies and outlook are going to be intertwined. For example, examining the real cost of burning carbon on society as a whole. One of the ways to address this problem is to tie the real cost of carbon to the way it is priced in the market place.

The issues of poverty, food production/dispersion, and the environment are more intertwined than Dalmia acknowledges. And a failure to acknowledge this, and to address it as a three-headed but singular problem (there are actually more heads on this hydra than that–foreign policy, for example), is to failure to form the comprehensive, cohesive strategy necessary to take a crack at these globally-scaled issues.

(Danke: Patrick Appel)

Never-ending consolidation

William Saletan on the universe’s newest unstoppable force:

Some GPS makers, Wortham reports, are responding to this trend [of declining GPS sales due to smartphones] by selling GPS as software for smartphones instead of selling it as hardware. Others are adding phone service to their GPS devices. Good luck with that. But the bottom line is that no matter how this fight ends—smartphones with GPS, GPS with smartphones, or add-on GPS software for your smartphone—only one device will remain. Consolidation is inexorable.

What will the smartphone eat next? In no particular order, my money’s on credit cards, car keys, flashlights, flash drives, books, television sets, and laptops. Some of these functions are already being absorbed. And one of these days, somebody will figure out how to add a stun gun. Just try not to hit the wrong button.

We’re almost there… check out this stun gun disguised as cell phone:

"Naughty, naughty, naughty! A 950,000 volt stun gun cleverly disguised as a harmless cell phone. Gain the tactical advantage over a would-be attacker with the Pretender Stun Gun! come see it now at www.defendfirst.com/pretender-cellphone-stun-gun.htm" (Photo by Defend First)

The exponential growth of tech

Cool tech watch: transparent solar cells for windows

Wow! Very cool. This makes worrying about the aesthetics of solar panels a non-issue once it hits the market.

Hubble repair begins

NYT:

“It’s an unbelievably beautiful sight,” reported astronaut John Grunsfeld, the telescope’s chief repairman. ”Amazingly, the exterior of Hubble, an old man of 19 years in space, still looks in fantastic shape.” [...]

Hubble’s unusually high orbit is strewn with smashed satellite pieces and other debris that could pierce the shuttle or suit of a spacewalking astronaut. [...]

Beginning Thursday, two teams of spacewalking astronauts — two men per team — will take turns venturing outside to replace Hubble’s batteries and gyroscopes, and an old camera and pointing mechanism. They also will install fresh thermal covers on the telescope and a new science data-control unit — the original conked out last September and, although revived, delayed the shuttle flight by seven months.

The space repairmen also will go into the guts of two broken science instruments and attempt to fix the fried electronics. Astronauts have never attempted anything like this before at Hubble.

LiFePO4 battery

This is cool… mostly because that “University of Texas professor” is who I’ll be doing research with in the fall:

“It’s a revolutionary battery because it is made from non-toxic materials abundant in the Earth’s crust. Plus, it’s not expensive,’” says Michel Gauthier, an invited professor at the Université de Montréal Department of Chemistry and co-founder of Phostech Lithium, the company that makes the battery material. “This battery could eventually make the electric car very profitable.”

The theory will soon be tested, since the 100 percent electric Microcar that’s set to debut in Europe this year will be and powered by the LifePO4 battery.

Phostech Lithium’s production plant in St. Bruno, Quebec, produces the black LifePO4 powder, which is shipped across the world in tightly sealed barrels.

“The theoretical principle behind the battery was patented by a University of Texas professor in 1995. However, without the work of local chemists such as Nathalie Ravet, we couldn’t have developed it,” says Phostech Lithium engineer Denis Geoffroy.

Star Trek in real life

Warp speed Mr. Scott!

Two Baylor University physicists believe they have an idea that can turn traveling at the speed of light from science fiction to science, and their idea does not break any laws of physics.

Dr. Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Dr. Richard Obousy, a Baylor post-doctoral student, theorize that by manipulating the space-time dimensions around the spaceship with a massive amount of energy, it would create a “bubble” that could push the ship faster than the speed of light. To create this bubble, the Baylor physicists believe manipulating the 11-dimension would create dark energy. Cleaver said positive dark energy is responsible for speeding up the universe as time moves on, just like it did after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded faster than the speed of light.

“Think of it like a surfer riding a wave,” said Cleaver, who co-authored the paper with Obousy about the new method. “The ship would be pushed by the bubble and the bubble would be traveling faster than the speed of light.”

CERN: an update

And then there was Bolivia

A 21st century international powerhouse-to-be:

Photographer/tumblogger Clayton Cubitt says, “Bolivia is the Saudi Arabia of lithium, the metal needed for the batteries that will power our electric car future. I saw this ITN report on News Hour the other night, and was stunned by the visuals and the story.”

(Danke: Sullivan)

Running buses on poop

Yes… it’s for real. Smells like a successful venture to me.

God I’m a nerd

"Urgent Mission" by xkcd

New generation of antibiotics (and pro-biotics)

Bonnie Bassler talks about how bacteria talk to each other. By understanding this chemical language, we can either jam or enhance the bacteria’s signals depending on whether we like or don’t like what that species does.

This might be the way around or current problems with unintentionally creating a “super-bug” with our current system of antibiotics. Fascinating:

more about “New generation of antibiotics (and pr…“, posted with vodpod

Cool tech watch

Turns your appliances that are in standby mode completely off, which leads to household energy savings of 12%! Pretty neat. Incredibly practical.

Nanocups collect light

Individual nanocup plasmon resonances, magnetic field enhancement and far field-angular scattering (red) for different nanocup orientations relative to the incident light. (A) High-energy axial electroinductive resonance with no incident light redirection. (B) Low-energy transverse magnetoinductive resonance with directional scattering and intensity dependent upon angle of incidence for the case of p-polarization. (Credit: Image courtesy of Rice University)

New in the world of solar energy collection and James Bond style espionage (my emphasis):

Researchers at Rice University have created a metamaterial that could light the way toward high-powered optics, ultra-efficient solar cells and even cloaking devices.

Naomi Halas, an award-winning pioneer in nanophotonics, and graduate student Nikolay Mirin created a material that collects light from any direction and emits it in a single direction. The material uses very tiny, cup-shaped particles called nanocups. [...]

In earlier research, Mirin had been trying to make a thin gold film with nano-sized holes when it occurred to him the knocked-out bits were worth investigating. Previous work on gold nanocups gave researchers a sense of their properties, but until Mirin’s revelation, nobody had found a way to lock ensembles of isolated nanocups to preserve their matching orientation.

“The truth is a lot of exciting science actually does fall in your lap by accident,” said Halas, Rice’s Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and professor of chemistry and biomedical engineering. “The big breakthrough here was being able to lift the nanocups off of a structure and preserve their orientation. Then we could look specifically at the properties of these oriented nanostructures.”