Lifting the Veil on Pluto’s Atmosphere

Artist David A. Hardy’s view of Pluto and Charon showing the possibility of haze, clouds and even cryovulcanism.
Credit: © David A. Hardy, www.astroart.org

You might guess that a small and distant world almost 40 times farther from the sun than the Earth is from the sun would not have an atmosphere, but in the case of Pluto, you’d be wrong. In fact, Pluto is a complex world, particularly when it comes to weather patterns. Gusty winds, clouds, haze, micro snowflakes and even ice volcanoes — cryovolcanism — could all be part of Pluto’s dynamic weather system. While such observations have come from Earth-based telescopes, many more surprises might be revealed as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft makes its nearest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015.

But no matter how you classify it, this icy and remote dwarf planet is an odd little world.

Evidence of Pluto’s atmosphere

Though Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, it wasn’t until 1988 that scientists first detected an atmosphere on the dwarf planet during a stellar occultation. In a stellar occultation, a body such as a planet passes in front of a relatively bright star, and measuring the gradual dimming of starlight during such an event, scientists can amass a wide array of information about a planet, including its size, whether it has rings or if an atmosphere is present. Having theoretically worked out that Pluto should have an atmosphere, scientists set out to find it.

“When the 1988 stellar occultation occurred, scientists were out to detect the atmosphere, which had been expected on theoretical grounds for more than a decade,” Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, said via email.

The June 9, 1988, stellar occultation by Pluto provided the first opportunity for astronomers using telescopes located in Australia, New Zealand, and the Kuiper Airborne Observatory flying over the ocean south of the Samoa islands to detect an atmosphere on the dwarf planet.

If an atmosphere on Pluto were not present, starlight would blink instantly off and then back on again at the end of the occultation. However, for a short time at the start and end of the occultation, Pluto’s atmosphere was backlit by the star, and the starlight dimmed more gradually. By modeling how the atmosphere refracted, or bent, the starlight, researchers detected that Pluto has a thin layer of atmosphere made of gaseous forms of the ices — nitrogen, methane, carbon monoxide and traces of others — that cover its surface.

“The occultation light curve shows a structured decline in intensity rather than a precipitous decline indicative of an atmosphere surrounding Pluto,” said Paul Delaney, a senior lecturer of physics and astronomy at York University in Toronto.

When astronomers graph the light data, a careful look at the gradual dimming of starlight shown in the occultation light curve reveals a “slight bend,” or “kink.” You can also see from the light curve that starlight does not penetrate all the way to Pluto’s surface. Starlight did not reach the surface, suggesting that obscuring clouds and/or haze might mask the surface.

“The symmetry and structure of the occultation light curve is suggestive of an atmosphere with structure, in comparison to the absence of an atmosphere surrounding Pluto,” Delaney noted. Hence, the presence of the same kink on either side of the curve suggests there is an atmosphere engulfing Pluto, he said.

The most recent Pluto occultation opportunity was on June 29, 2015, in the southern hemisphere, just two weeks before New Horizons makes its closest approach to the Pluto system. The only observatory able to position itself directly in the center of Pluto’s shadow, located off of New Zealand, was NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a Boeing 747SP jetliner modified to carry a 100-inch-diameter (2.5 meters) telescope.

“SOFIA observations of Pluto demonstrate a capability to make detailed measurements of Pluto’s atmospheric density and structure,” said Pamela Marcum, SOFIA program scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “SOFIA conducted its first occultation observation, also involving Pluto, in July 2011. This flight adds to our understanding of how the atmosphere of Pluto evolves over multiple-year time scales as its elongated orbit takes it farther away from the sun.”

The comparative sizes of the atmospheres of Pluto and Earth.
Credit: Simulation Curriculum, www.PlutoSafari.com

Seasonal changes on Pluto

Once the existence of Pluto’s atmosphere was confirmed, scientists began to investigate how the atmosphere and the surface temperature change during Pluto’s 248-Earth-year journey around the sun. The orbit of Pluto follows a highly elliptical orbit that resembles a squashed circle. In fact, its orbit is so elliptical that during perihelion (its closest point to the sun), Pluto is only about 30 astronomical units (AU) from the sun, bringing it closer to the sun than to its closest neighbor, Neptune.

During aphelion (its farthest point from the sun), Pluto is about 50 AU from the sun. (One AU is about 150 million kilometers (93 million miles), defined as one Earth-sun distance.)

The large 20-AU difference between Pluto’s perihelion and aphelion distance results in interesting chemistry on Pluto’s surface and in its atmosphere. Pluto is a rocky body covered in ice. At perihelion, Pluto’s surface temperature increases to about minus 220 degrees Celsius (minus 364 degrees Fahrenheit), allowing the ice on its surface to sublimate — that is, transition directly from a solid to a gas. The resulting vapors form a layer of atmosphere made of molecular nitrogen (with trace amounts of carbon monoxide and methane).

Scientists originally thought that as Pluto recedes from the sun, and the temperature decreases to about minus 240 C (minus 400 F), the vapors freeze and fall back down to the dwarf planet’s surface. However, observations made as recently as 2013 and coordinated by the Portable High-Speed OccultationTelescope group from multiple sites including the 0.9 m astrograph at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) and the 1 m Liverpool Telescope on the Canary Islands, indicate that Pluto’s atmosphere is not collapsing, but rather thickening.

So, although Pluto’s atmosphere gets thicker and thinner through its orbit of the sun, it may never completely freeze out and “collapse.”

Michael Summers, New Horizons co-investigator and member of the atmospheres science theme team, said it’s too early to tell whether Pluto’s atmosphere freezes out or persists through its orbit. This makes sense, as Pluto has made only one-tenth of an orbit around the sun since the discovery of its atmosphere in 1988.

Summers used a tangible analogy to explain what may be happening — one that we see daily on Earth. “There is a time delay between the highest temperature and the maximum heating. … The maximum heating from the sun during the day is when the sun is directly overhead, at noon,” he explained. “But the highest temperature usually occurs later, around 2 p.m. in the afternoon. The Earth continues to heat up from noon to 2 p.m. That is due to a thermal lag; it takes less time to heat up the atmosphere than it takes for it to cool off.

“I think, for Pluto, it just takes time for it to cool off,” Summers added. “In fact, it may still be heating up, sort of like we are still in the Earth’s, say 1 p.m., time frame for Pluto.”

Another interesting fact about Pluto’s atmosphere is that it evolves quickly. Work by a team led by Jane Greaves, an astrophysics researcher at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, shows that the carbon monoxide density in Pluto’s atmosphere has increased in just a decade. Additionally, Greaves’ team found carbon monoxide extending out to more than 1,860 miles (3,000 kilometers) from Pluto’s surface. The molecules that reach such extents will likely escape, as solar winds will just carry them out into space.

When New Horizons arrives at the Pluto system, onboard science instruments such as Alice, a sensitive ultraviolet imaging spectrometer, will reveal even more about the composition and structure of the dwarf planet’s dynamic atmosphere. Continued observations of stellar occultations of Pluto will show us whether its atmosphere freezes out. Pluto last reached perihelion in 1989, and it will not reach perihelion again until 2237. Therefore, if its atmosphere does freeze out, scientists won’t observe this until somewhere around the year 2200.

Read Full Article: Space

Why More Scientists are Speaking Out on Contentious Issues

Image Credit: PAUL NICKLEN, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

For decades Ken Lertzman has studied the ecology of Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest. Wedged between British Columbia’s Coast Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, this rugged forest is home to thousand-year-old red cedars, salmon runs, millions of migratory birds, and the elusive white spirit bear.

On Wednesday, Lertzman and more than a hundred other North American scientists, including a Nobel laureate, signed a statement calling for a moratorium on development of Alberta’s vast oil sands.

Lertzman, a professor at Simon Fraser University, worries that transporting the oil through Great Bear would harm one of the world’s last remaining unspoiled temperate rain forests.

The declaration by a diverse group of ecologists, economists, climate researchers, and other academics is the most recent example of a tidal shift at universities across North America.

While their counterparts in Europe have long taken advocacy positions for using  science in setting public policy, academics in the U.S. and Canada traditionally have not. Many scientists, particularly in the United States, worry about being labeled as environmentalists or activists by politicians, business lobbyists, or interest groups and losing their scientific credibility.

But now many North American scientists are increasingly leveraging their knowledge to speak out in environmental debates.

A 2014 Pew survey of more than 3,700 U.S. scientists found that 87 percent agreed that “scientists should take an active role in public policy debates about issues related to science and technology.” Just 13 percent backed the opposite statement: “Scientists should focus on establishing sound scientific facts and stay out of public policy debates.”

Lertzman has seen this shift up close over the course of his 35-year career. As a young scientist in the 1980s, he thought the idea of academic scientists engaging in public policy seemed pretty radical, albeit exciting. Now, he says, “the idea of using science to make a difference in the world is becoming pretty pervasive and accepted.”

“We are advocating for society to make the best possible decisions based on the best possible knowledge. We shouldn’t feel bad about that,” Lertzman says.

Scientists Drawn Into Fractious Debates

This outspokenness may be fueled, in part, by the Canada’s firing of federal scientists who have talked openly about their findings on some environmental topics.

“There’s a sense among scientists that their collective expertise is under attack, and they want to do something about it, but they don’t know how,” says University of Michigan science historian Joy Rohde.

Over the past few years, under the leadership of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canada has laid off some environmental researchers and closed federal environmental science institutes—cuts that some critics suggest were made in part to protect the oil and gas industry.

Near Fort McMurray, in Alberta, oil sands processing is under way. More than a hundred U.S. and Canadian scientists on Wednesday urged a moratorium on oil sands development due to environmental concerns. – PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER ESSICK, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

“Scientific expertise is not valued by the federal government in Canada,” says Peter Ross, a marine toxicologist whose federal research program in Canada was cut in 2012. Ross now studies ocean health at the non-profit Vancouver Aquarium.

In the United States, the political landscape of environmental issues is fractious because of the litigious and adversarial role of industry in many regulatory debates, says Sheila Jasanoff, a science policy and law expert at Harvard University. Scientists are often drawn into public controversies and quarrels over the validity of their research. Science squabbles—for instance, whether or not humans are causing climate change—are far less common in other parts of the world, Jasanoff says.

How to wean the economy off fossil fuels, dispose of nuclear waste, or regulate toxic chemicals—these are complex questions. Decisions about environmental health, such as whether to regulate flame retardants in consumer products, are particularly controversial because there are big financial stakes and the science is often rife with uncertainty about the health risks.

“Science alone will never resolve the values debate on how to manage these situations,” says Daniel Sarewitz, co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes at Arizona State University. 

Although she worked for government, not academia, the most famous American scientist who crusaded for new environmental policies was biologist Rachel Carson. In her 1962 classic, Silent Spring, Carson warned about the hazards of pesticides. She was personally attacked by the farm and chemical  industries and their supporters as hysterical, unscientific, disloyal, and radical.  But her writings catalyzed the U.S. movement to ban the pesticide DDT and enact many new environmental laws.

Swedish Scientists Lead the Way

The separation between science and politics in the United States dates back to the Civil War—when an Act of Congress and Abraham Lincoln established the National Academy of Sciences, Rohde says.

But in Sweden, which has led the world in taking action on regulation of chemicals, scientists have a long history of public discourse.

For centuries, professors at Sweden’s universities were appointed by the monarchy. “Scientists were free to criticize the king [without retribution] in order to improve the society,” says Åke Bergman, an environmental chemist at Stockholm University and executive director of the Swedish academic research center Swetox.

Read Full Article: National Geographic

How Republican presidential candidates are getting away with denying evolution

Image Credit: Zach Roberts/ZUMA Press/Corbis

A neurosurgeon who believes the human brain is too complex for anyone but God, an ophthalmologist who refuses to talk about the age of the Earth, and a Harvard-trained lawyer beloved by creationists are running for president of the United States, raising the prospect of an election without science.

Retired doctor Ben Carson joined senators Rand Paul (the ophthalmologist) and Ted Cruz (the Harvard alum) on the campaign trail on Monday, vying for the Republican nomination against each other and other confirmed and likely candidates including Senator Marco Rubio, former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker.

But despite assorted elite educations and illustrious careers, none can apparently make up their minds about basics of modern science – that the Earth is about 4.5bn years old, that humans evolved from earlier primates over millions of years, and that people are making the world dangerously warm.

“I think on issues like climate change and evolution it ends up being a proxy for identity politics,” said Michael Halpern, a program manager for the nonprofit and nonpartisan Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). “You’re not actually talking about the science, you’re talking about values.”

So far the candidates have mostly hemmed and hawed – save Carson, who outright rejected the theory of evolution when speaking to Faith & Liberty radio last year.

“Carbon dating, all these things,” he said “really doesn’t mean anything to a God who has the ability to create anything at any point in time.

“Dealing with the complexity of the human brain,” Carson continued, “and somebody says that came from a slime pit full of promiscuous biochemicals? I don’t think so.”

Curiously, Carson did not reject natural selection – the engine that drives evolution – saying he “totally believe[s]” that useful genetic traits are more often passed on than less useful traits. But he could not draw the connection between that process acting over millennia and the human eye: “Give me a break. According to their scheme – boom, it had to occur overnight.”

Instead, he suggested an “intelligent creator” gave organisms the ability to adapt “so he doesn’t have to start over every 50 years creating all over again”.

Cruz – whose father has said evolution is a communist plot – has courted the creationist camp with only a dab more subtlety. While avoiding talk of his own beliefs, he announced his campaign at the evangelical Liberty University, which teaches creationism as science.

Paul, Rubio and Walker have tried to duck the issue. In 2010 Paul refused to answer a Kentucky homeschool student’s question whether the Earth was only a few thousand years old, and in 2012 Rubio told GQ: “I’m not a scientist, man … I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says.”

In February 2015, Walker earned the ridicule of his British hosts by dodging a question about evolution.

Only Bush has said that he believes in evolution – way back in 2005. But he also said schools should sort out curriculums on their own.

Because creationism and intelligent design cannot be tested and are not falsifiable, they do not meet the criteria of scientific theories. They might be valid topics for philosophy or religion classes, UCS argues, but when conflated with science make it harder for people to trust scientists.

“When other stories of creation are confused with evolution it muddies the waters,” Halpern said.

On climate change, the candidates fare little better – almost uniformly saying they are “skeptics” and that while global warming may be real it might not be our fault. Rubio accepts it but denies its origin; Bush, Paul and Cruz toe the skeptic line; Walker and Carson prefer to talk about regulations and resources.

But Halpern suggested that the inch toward acceptance was progress: “Dodging questions about climate change is no longer an acceptable path forward, so Republicans and Democrats are shifting to talking about what to do about the impacts and away from the science itself.”

More than the “values” issues of evolution and global warming, Halpern said, science might lose its say in government because of Congress, where a few candidates have shown their cards. Obscure bills such as the Secret Science Reform Act and Regulatory Accountability Act would undermine and handicap the ways federal agencies rely on science by forcing them to go through a glacial, bitter and mostly unproductive Congress.

The secret science bill would require the EPA to release the data it uses to devise regulations – an aim seemingly inoffensive enough, except that the EPA often relies on confidential medical records whose release could land it in court. Other bills would require congressional approval for all new regulation, or give Congress the power to decide which scientists get to advise agencies.

The Obama administration has threatened to veto these bills, which fit the mold for bills that Paul, Cruz, Rubio, Walker and Carson have suggested they would sign. Each has consistently said they would shrink federal agencies and curtail regulations as president, and impose more rules on those agencies.

“Wherever science threatens a vested interest, whether that be on greenhouse gas emissions or ideological issues like emergency contraception, you see an attempt to politicize science,” Halpern said.

Read Full Article: The Guardian

Ebola drug cures monkeys infected with West African virus strain

An experimental drug has cured monkeys infected with the Ebola virus, US-based scientists have said.

The treatment, known as TKM-Ebola-Guinea, targets the Makona strain of the virus, which caused the current deadly outbreak in West Africa.

All three monkeys receiving the treatment were healthy when the trial ended after 28 days; three untreated monkeys died within nine days.

Scientists cautioned that the drug’s efficacy has not been proven in humans.

At present, there are no treatments or vaccines for Ebola that have been proven to work in humans.

University of Texas scientist Thomas Geisbert, who was the senior author of the study published in the journal Nature, said: “This is the first study to show post-exposure protection… against the new Makona outbreak strain of Ebola-Zaire virus.”

Results from human trials with the drug are expected in the second half of this year.

Gene blocking

Mr Geisbert said the drug, produced by Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, could be adapted to target any strain of Ebola and could be manufactured in as little as eight weeks.

It works by blocking particular genes, which stops the virus replicating.

The two-month production time compares with the several months needed to make ZMapp – another experimental drug, which cured monkeys with a different strain of Ebola than the one in the current outbreak.

Since March 2014, more than 10,602 people have been reported as having died from the disease in six countries – Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, the US and Mali.

Read Full Article: BBC News

Artificial Photosynthesis Advance Hailed As Major Breakthrough

In what’s being called a win-win for the environment and the production of renewable energy, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, have achieved a major breakthrough in artificial photosynthesis.

The scientists have created a system that can capture carbon dioxide emissions before they’re released into the atmosphere and convert them into fuels, pharmaceuticals, plastics, and other valuable products.

Too much gas. Carbon dioxide is the principal greenhouse gas produced by the burning of fossil fuels and has been identified as a major contributor to rising global temperatures.

“Our system has the potential to fundamentally change the chemical and oil industry in that we can produce chemicals and fuels in a totally renewable way, rather than extracting them from deep below the ground,” Dr. Peidong Yang, a chemist with the materials sciences division at Berkeley Lab and one of the researchers behind the breakthrough, said in a written statement.

The new artificial photosynthesis system was developed by scientists including Peidong Yang (left), Christopher Chang, and Michelle Chang.

Scientists around the world have spent decades looking for a practical way to mimic photosynthesis. That’s the process in which green plants use energy from sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbohydrates. But it’s proven to be a difficult technical challenge.

“The real issue comes from the balance of energy efficiency, cost, and stability, Dr. Amanda J. Morris, assistant professor of chemistry at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and an expert in sustainable energy, told The Huffington Post in an email. “Electrons, which are required, are very expensive (either produced from gasoline, oil, coal or solar) and so, the process must be very efficient in terms of electron and energy balances.”

Morris, who was not involved in the new research, called it “important,” adding that it would guide future efforts in the field.

Biology-nanotechnology mash-up. The heart of the new system is an array of minute silicon and titanium oxide wires studded with Sporomusa ovata bacteria. The “nanowires” capture light energy and deliver it the bacteria, which convert carbon dioxide in the air into acetate (a key building block for the more complex organic molecules in fuels, biodegradable plastics, and pharmaceuticals).

Read Full Article: The Huffington Post

The Earth Has An Eerie Hum, And Now We Know What’s Causing It

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Scientists have long known that Earth produces an eerie low-frequency hum that’s inaudible to humans but detectable with seismic instruments. But as for what’s causing this “microseismic” activity, scientists have never been sure.

Until now.

A new study published online Feb. 10, 2015 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters indicates that the hum is largely due to ocean waves that cause our planet to vibrate subtly — or “ring,” as the researchers put it.

“We have made a big step in explaining this,” Dr. Fabrice Ardhuin, a senior research scientist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Brest, France and the study’s lead author, said in a written statement. “Now we know where this ringing comes from and the next question is: what can we do with it.”

Catching the culprit. With the help of computer models of the ocean, winds, and seafloor, the scientists were able to pinpoint the exact kind of ocean waves that cause the hum and how, Live Science reported.

The researchers found that collisions between ocean waves generate some seismic activity, but it was mostly the movement and pressure of giant, slow-moving ocean waves that extend all the way down to the seafloor that cause the Earth to hum.

The graphic on the left shows the computed height of giant waves that can reach the seafloor. The picture on the right shows these types of waves during a storm at a beach south of Bordeaux, France. The pressure of these long ocean waves on the seafloor generates seismic waves that cause the Earth to oscillate, scientists say.

How the hum can help. The microseismic activity caused by the giant ocean waves penetrates deep into Earth’s mantle — and possibly to its core. That suggests that by recording it, scientists may be able to gain a more detailed picture of our planet’s interior, according to the researchers.

Read Full Article: The Huffington Post

IWC panel: Japan’s Antarctic whale hunt still not convincing

Image Credit: Wikipedia

TOKYO (AP) – An International Whaling Commission panel said Monday that Japan’s revised plan for research whaling in the Antarctic still lacks a convincing explanation of why it needs to kill the mammals.

“The current proposal does not demonstrate the need for lethal sampling” to achieve Japan’s stated objectives, said the expert panel, part of the IWC’s scientific committee.

Japan said the goal of its plan is to obtain highly accurate data to determine sustainable minke catch quotas and study the ecology of the Antarctic.

Japanese fisheries officials responded to the panel’s comments by saying they are open to revisions, but did not indicate to what extent.

Joji Morishita, Japan’s commissioner to the IWC, said it would be best if Japan can convince the full scientific committee by providing additional data sought by the panel’s report, but cautioned that it may not be easy. The full scientific committee is to meet in May.

“The scientific committee is more political than the panel,” he said. “I won’t be surprised if we face some countries that oppose our plans not because of science,” Morishita said. “But we hope to work toward a resumption (of research whaling) at the end of the year.”

Commercial whaling was banned by the whaling commission in 1986, but Japan has continued to kill whales under an exemption for scientific research. However, the International Court of Justice ruled last year that the hunts were not truly scientific.

Following the ruling, Japan submitted a revised plan last November for the upcoming Antarctic whaling season. It said it plans to catch 333 minke whales each year between 2015 and 2027, down from a 2005-2013 annual target of up to 1,035 whales – 935 minke and 100 fin and humpback whales. A nonlethal expedition for the 2014 season recently returned from the Antarctic.

Read Full Article: AP

Can squid help make soldiers invisible?

Image Credit: TechTelling

Atlanta (CNN) – One of the world’s oldest organism groups, cephalopods, like squid, octopus and cuttlefish, have survived in Earth’s oceans for millions of years.

They key to their survival: mastering the art of camouflage.

Now, scientists say, these ancient invertebrates may hold the key to developing a combat technology that will allow soldiers to avoid infrared detection.

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine say they have discovered a way to use proteins in the cells of pencil squid to develop “invisibility stickers” that can be worn by ground troops.

“Soldiers wear uniforms with the familiar green and brown camouflage patterns to blend into foliage during the day, but under low light and at night, they’re still vulnerable to infrared detection,” said Alon Gorodetsky, assistant professor of chemical engineering and material sciences.

“You can draw inspiration from natural systems that have been perfected over millions of years, giving us ideas we might never have been able to come up with otherwise,” he said.

Gorodetsky and his team have focused on specialized squid cells known as iridocytes, which contain a unique light-reflecting protein called reflectin. They were able to engineer E. coli bacteria to synthesize reflectin and coat the protein onto a packing tape-like surface to create the “invisibility stickers.”

Researchers say these reflectin-coated stickers can be changed into virtually any color with a chemical or mechanical stimulus.

“There is a lot of flexibility in how one can deploy this material, essentially, by taking the stickers and putting them all over yourself, you could look one way under optical visualization and another way under active infrared visualization,” Gorodetsky said.

The lab technology is not ready to be used in combat zones as researchers work to develop an adaptive camouflage system, in which multiple stickers are able to work in sync and respond to varying infrared wavelengths.

Read Full Article: CNN

Until universities divest from fossil fuels they will undermine all they stand for

Image Credit: Murdo Macleod/Murdo Macleod

The fossil fuel industry has a proven track record of funding and orchestrating climate science disinformation. For nearly 30 years it has worked to deliberately confuse the public, slander scientists, and sabotage science. A new study last month from The Union of Concerned Scientists, founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Henry Kendall documents how many fossil fuel interests continue this pattern, years after promising to quit. So why are universities like MIT financing these doubt mongers, who undermine the integrity of science and our very raison d’être: truth and knowledge?

I started doing renewable energy research when I was in high school, and have always believed in the power of science to make the world a better place. But 10 years later, as I come to the end of my PhD in materials science and engineering at MIT, I’m starting to wonder.

Working in the lab each day, trying to build better solar cells and brighter LEDs, I’ve realized that while MIT is fighting climate change with one hand, it is feeding it with the other – investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the fossil fuel industry. When will it stand with science by divesting from fossil fuel companies that undermine it?

Climate science denial is as clear as the science itself. This month, The Merchants of Doubt – a film based on research by Harvard science historian Professor Naomi Oreskes and co-author Erik Conway – exposes the fossil fuel lobby’s self-described “win ugly or lose pretty” tactics, drawn straight from Big Tobacco’s playbook.

ExxonMobil is Exhibit A. Between 1998 and 2012, it channeled more than $27m to 66 organizations that challenge the scientific evidence of global warming. Among them is The Heartland Institute, which in 2012 ran a billboard campaignlikening people who accept climate change to terrorists and serial killers. In 2002, ExxonMobil pledged $100m to Stanford, then ran an advertisement in The New York Times carrying the university’s seal that suggested “there is a lively debate”about the reality of global warming – though there is no such thing.

These days most firms publicly endorse mainstream climate science and insist the deception is over. Yet the campaign continues, with funding for climate change deniers often funneled through third party foundations as untraceable “dark money”. This February, it was uncovered that ExxonMobil, Southern Company, the American Petroleum Institute, and a Koch foundation paid climate deniers’poster child, Harvard-Smithsonian “scientist” Willie Soon, $1.25m over the last 14 years for “deliverables” of climate denial, including scientific papers and congressional testimony. In response, three US senators have sent inquiries to 100 fossil fuel companies and NGOs to investigate “denial-for-hire operations”, and a US representative has written to seven universities, including MIT.

Politicians are another powerful megaphone for climate contrarianism. On average, a congressional climate denier receives quadruple the fossil fuel contributions of a non-denier. Senator James Inhofe, who has repeatedly described global warming as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” and comparedenvironmentalists to Nazis, has taken $1,757,071 in contributions from the oil and gas industry.

Fossil fuel interests increasingly supplement disinformation with insidious, defeatist, and self-serving misinformation: decades of fossil fuel burning asinevitable for human prosperity; renewable energy expansion as “difficult – if not impossible”; and climate regulation as “highly unlikely” to sway business-as-usual. The American Petroleum Institute’s spending on advertising – more than $400m between 2008 and 2013 – dwarfs that of other trade associations.

Read Full Article: The Guardian

Tech titans’ latest project: Defy death

Seated at the head of a table for 12 with a view of the city’s soaring skyline, Peter Thiel was deep in conversation with his guests, eclectic scientists whose research was considered radical, even heretical.

It was 2004 and Thiel had recently made a tidy fortune selling PayPal, which he co-founded, to eBay. He had spent what he wanted on himself — a posh penthouse suite at the Four Seasons Hotel and a silver Ferrari — and was now soliciting ideas to do good with his money.

The chatter at the dinner party meandered from the value of chocolate in one’s diet to the toll of disease on the U.S. economy to the merits of uploading people’s memories to a computer versus cryofreezing their bodies. Yet the focus kept returning to one subject: Was death an inevitability — or a solvable problem?

A number of guests were skeptical about achieving immortality. But could science and technology help us live longer, to, say, 150 years? Now that, they agreed, was a worthy goal.

Within a few months, Thiel had written checks to Kenyon and de Grey to accelerate their work. Since then he has doled out millions to other researchers with what he calls “breakout” ideas that defy conventional wisdom.

“If you think you can only do very little and be very incremental, then you’ll work only on very incremental things. It’s self-fulfilling,” Thiel, who is 47 and estimated to be worth $2.2 billion, said in an interview. “It’s those who have an optimism about what can be done that will shape the future.”

He and the tech titans who founded Google, Facebook, eBay, Napster and Netscape are using their billions to rewrite the nation’s science agenda and transform biomedical research. Their objective is to use the tools of technology — the chips, software programs, algorithms and big data they used in creating an information revolution — to understand and upgrade what they consider to be the most complicated piece of machinery in existence: the human body.

The entrepreneurs are driven by a certitude that rebuilding, regenerating and reprogramming patients’ organs, limbs, cells and DNA will enable people to live longer and better. The work they are funding includes hunting for the secrets of living organisms with insanely long lives, engineering microscopic nanobots that can fix your body from the inside out, figuring out how to reprogram the DNA you were born with, and exploring ways to digitize your brain based on the theory that your mind could live long after your body expires.

“I believe that evolution is a true account of nature,” as Thiel put it. “But I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.”

Oracle founder Larry Ellison has proclaimed his wish to live forever and donated more than $430 million to anti-aging research. “Death has never made any sense to me,” he told his biographer, Mike Wilson. “How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?”

During the first stage of their careers, the technologists spent their time solving problems in an industry that might seem glamorous but that in the grand scheme of things has been built on automating mundane tasks: how to pay for a book online, stream a TV episode onto a phone and keep tabs on friends. In contrast, they describe their biomedical research ventures in heroic terms reminiscent of science-fiction plots, where the protagonist saves humanity from destruction through technological wizardry.

Their confidence in that wizardry and their own ideas may lead them to underestimate the downsides and even dangers of the work they are funding, say some science philosophers, historians and economists. Their research in stem cells, neuroscience, genetically modified organisms and viruses, for example, tinkers with nature in big ways that easily could go awry — and operates in a largely unregulated space.

Their work to slow or stop aging, if successful, is also likely to lead to broader societal upheaval, increasing pressure on natural resources and on the economy, as people live longer, work longer and imperil already strained entitlements such as Social Security. Life extension also would radically change the most important building block of society: the family. No one seems able to predict what life might be like when half a dozen or more generations are alive simultaneously.

Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist at Northwestern University, worries that some of the billionaires’ obsession with longevity may be driven as much by hubris as a desire to do public good.

“It’s incredibly exciting and wonderful to be part of a species that dreams in a big way,” she said. “But I also want to be part of a species that takes care of the poor and the dying, and I’m worried that our attention is being drawn away to a glittery future world that is fantasy and not the world we live in.”

Read Full Article: The Washington Post

Big oil is pressuring scientists not to link fracking to earthquakes in Oklahoma

Image Credit: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Many Oklahomans can still vividly recall the day they experienced their first earthquake. Ever since 2009/2010, earthquakes in the state have increased exponentially – leading to what are called “seismic swarms”. In 2000 there was not a single earthquake, but in 2014 we experienced 585 quakes of magnitude three or larger.

Oklahomans want to get to the bottom of this mystery increase of quakes and are turning to state officials for answers. As a state legislator, I am concerned that a conflict of interest in universities could get in the way of finding answers – and implementing solutions.

For some time now, scientists have wondered whether fracking-related activities, such as wastewater injection, might be the source of increased seismic activity in Oklahoma. In May of last year, the Oklahoma Geological Survey, an affiliate entity of the University of Oklahoma, released a statement in conjunction with the United States Geological Survey, saying that wastewater injection was a “likely contributing factor the increase in earthquakes”.

Not long after this statement, David Boren, president of the university, summoned the Oklahoma Geological Survey’s lead seismologist Austin Holland, who was also one of the authors of the statement, to a meeting with Harold Hamm, CEO of Continental Resources, one of Oklahoma’s largest oil and gas exploration and production companies. Boren facilitated the meeting despite the fact that he also serves as a member of the Continental Resources board of directors.

In July 2014, Continental Resources released a presentation
positing an alternative theory for the seismic swarms and downplaying the influence of induced seismicity. One can only imagine the pressure this meeting must have brought upon Holland and his team of scientists.

That’s why state policy makers like myself are concerned that industry pressure conveyed through the highest levels of academia could compromise the deliberative and fact-based response by which state officials are attempting to put an end to the seismic swarms.

It has become exceedingly clear that Oklahoma’s particular geology is conducive to induced seismicity from injecting wastewater from the fracking process into the ground near faultlines.

State officials have responded to these findings by attempting to parse the responsible well site operators from the irresponsible ones. In particular, the state is focused on discouraging injections near faultlines, prohibiting injections which are too deep, and collecting real time pressure data from injection sites located near the quakes.

Read Full Article: The Guardian

Scientists in US are urged to seek contact with aliens

Scientists at a US conference have said it is time to try actively to contact intelligent life on other worlds.

Researchers involved in the search for extra-terrestrial life are considering what the message from Earth should be.

The call was made by the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence institute at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose.

But others argued that making our presence known might be dangerous.

Researchers at the Seti institute have been listening for signals from outer space for more than 30 years using radio telescope facilities in the US. So far there has been no sign of ET.

The organisation’s director, Dr Seth Shostak, told attendees to the AAAS meeting that it was now time to step up the search.

“Some of us at the institute are interested in ‘active Seti’, not just listening but broadcasting something to some nearby stars because maybe there is some chance that if you wake somebody up you’ll get a response,” he told BBC News.

The concerns are obvious, but sitting in his office at the institute in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, he expresses them with characteristic, impish glee.

Game over?

“A lot of people are against active Seti because it is dangerous. It is like shouting in the jungle. You don’t know what is out there; you better not do it. If you incite the aliens to obliterate the planet, you wouldn’t want that on your tombstone, right?”

I couldn’t argue with that. But initially, I could scarcely believe I was having this conversation at a serious research institute rather than at a science fiction convention. The sci-fi feel of our talk was underlined by the toy figures of bug-eyed aliens that cheerfully decorate the office.

But Dr Shostak is a credible and popular figure and has been invited to present his arguments.

Leading astronomers, anthropologists and social scientists will gather at his institute after the AAAS meeting for a symposium to flesh out plans for a proposal for active Seti to put to the public and politicians.

High on the agenda is whether such a move would, as he put it so starkly, lead to the “obliteration” of the planet.

“I don’t see why the aliens would have any incentive to do that,” Dr Shostak tells me.

“Beyond that, we have been telling them willy-nilly that we are here for 70 years now. They are not very interesting messages but the early TV broadcasts, the early radio, the radar from the Second World War – all that has leaked off the Earth.

“Any society that could come here and ruin our whole day by incinerating the planet already knows we are here.”

Clash of cultures

His argument isn’t entirely reassuring. But neither is the one made by David Brin, a science fiction writer invited to speak at the AAAS meeting, who opposes the plan.

“Historians will tell you that first contact between industrial civilisations and indigenous people does not go well,” he told me.

Mr Brin believes that those in favour of active Seti have been “railroading the public into sending a message without a wide and detailed discussion of what the cultural impact might be”.

He does not fear a Hollywood-style alien invasion and thinks the likelihood of making contact is extremely low. But the risks, he argues, are extremely high and so merit careful consideration before anyone sends out a signal to potentially habitable worlds.

Read Full Article: BBC News