DART mission

NASA’s Asteroid Redirection Test Alters Its Orbital Period

15 best science books of all time

OK, just 15 more to go.

Maybe I'll watch the movie to get one out of the way.

*** [1/4/21]

Down to 5 to go

It’s not all bad! 20 things that made the world a better place in 2020

From record-beating scientific discoveries to an elephant baby boom, 2020 was about much more than just the global pandemic

This is not a year we'll look back on fondly. It began with Australia on fire and ends with more than 1.5 million dead in a pandemic.

But there have been bright points in this annus horribilis. While many of us saved lives by hunkering down at home watching Netflix, a communal act of selflessness that shouldn't be soon forgotten, progress was made in science, the environment, and even politics – Biden won! We can buy lab-grown meat! British beavers built a dam for the first time in 400 years!

Here's our rundown of the best news to come out of 2020. 

The world's first mRNA vaccine was made in less than a year

The world's medical and pharma scientists have never made a vaccine as quickly as it did this year – and we got three out of the bargain, with more to come. But the BioNTech and Moderna vaccines will not only let us emerge from lockdown, they're also the first using messenger RNA, proving that vaccine technology works. That not only opens the door for its use against existing diseases but also means we could more quickly make vaccines to fight future pandemics – because we may have to do this all over gain someday. Read more at WIRED.

Lab-grown meat on sale for first time

The era of slaughter for protein could be coming to an end, with the Singapore Food Agency approving for the first time the sale of lab-grown chicken. Made by American company Eat Just, the cells for the "chicken bites" are harvested from live animals and grown in a bioreactor. Though foetal bovine serum is still used in the process, the company plans to switch to a plant-based growing medium for its next production line. Read more at The Guardian

DeepMind solves 50-year-old protein folding problem

DeepMind's AI has accurately predicted protein shapes from their sequences alone, a tough task that normally requires lengthy, expensive lab experiments. While the AI, known as AlphaFold, couldn't unpick all protein structures, it has helped answer questions that have long challenged researchers – and could herald major changes in medical research. Read more at Nature

Nuclear fusion could give us unlimited clean energy

Researchers are building a star on Earth in an attempt to create nuclear power without the radioactive waste. The Joint European Torus (JET) will begin work next year, smashing together hydrogen atoms to generate energy and heat, which could eventually be harvested to generate electricity. Read more at WIRED

Kiwis gift Remarkables land to nation

Dill and Jillian Jardine could have sold their 900 hectares along the shore of Lake Wakatipu in New Zealand's Remarkables mountain range to developers. After all, the region is popular among the remarkably wealthy, including PayPal and Palantir founder Peter Thiel. Instead, the farming couple donated it to a local trust as a park for the enjoyment of everyone, not just billionaires. Read more at The Guardian

Beavers build first dam in four centuries

The National Trust released beavers into the wild in January, after the buck-toothed creatures went extinct in England four-hundred years ago. Efforts to return the animals have found success with beavers in Scotland relocated to the Holnicote Estate in Exmoor, where they've settled in well enough to chew up a few trees and assemble a "modest but… incredibly special" dam, according to the Trust. Read more at the BBC

Spider rediscovered in Surrey

Mike Waite of the Surrey Wildlife Trust spent two years in the dark tramping around a Ministry of Defence site, searching for a specific species of spider not seen in the UK since 1999. But in October, he spotted it: a great fox-spider. "It's a gorgeous spider, if you're into that kind of thing," he said. The two-inch creature doesn't build a web, instead chasing beetles and smaller arachnids in order to immobilise them with venom that liquefies their organs. How very 2020. Read more at The Guardian

First new coral reef found in 120 years

Scientists mapping the seafloor north of Australia's Great Barrier Reef made a massive discovery: a new reef that's taller than the Empire State Building. It's the first such coral structure to be found in the region in 120 years, and aided by an underwater robot, the year-long exploration journey also discovered 30 new species of sea life, including a 150-foot predator string – yes, that's right – known as a siphonophore. Read more at the BBC

Pandas have sex after decade-long wait

When the pandemic hit, Hong Kong's Ocean Park zoo shut to visitors. Several weeks later, perhaps enjoying their new-found privacy, pandas Ying Ying and Le Le did something zookeepers had been trying to inspire for ten long years: they had sex. The mating doesn't appear to have led to a pregnancy for Ling Ling, but getting it on after ten years of ignoring each other is encouraging to those in stale long-term relationships everywhere. Read more at VICE

There's a baby boom – for elephants

The Amboseli National Park in Kenya reported more than 170 calves by the end of summer, versus 113 in all of 2018 – including two sets of twins. The pachyderm pregnancy peak followed heavy rain the previous year, which means better grazing and more successful births. Alongside the elephantine baby boom, Kenya has said that the rate of poaching has fallen to just seven – down from 80 in 2018 – with numbers of the animals rebounding from 16,000 in 1989 to more than 34,000. Read more at NPR

Painting turbine blades slashes bird deaths

The shift to wind power is good news for the planet, but bad news for birds that fly into the blades of turbines at onshore wind farms. Researchers at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research have found a potential solution: painting one of the three rotor blades black to make them easier to see. And it worked, reducing bird strikes by 70 per cent – not bad for a lick of paint. Read more at the BBC

UK record coal-free run tops 67 days

67 days, 22 hours and 55 minutes – it's the longest the UK has gone without coal-generated power since the industrial revolution. The record run came to an end mid-June only because a north Yorkshire power station fired up a coal unit for maintenance. The rest of the energy mix during the two-plus months was dominated by renewable energy at 36 per cent, followed by gas at 33 per cent and nuclear at 21 per cent. Read more at The Independent

Enzyme eats through plastics

Plastic waste is choking the planet, but researchers at the University of Toulouse: have found a mutant bacterial enzyme that will happily chew through it all, breaking it down for easy recycling into new plastic materials. The enzyme was originally discovered in a compost heap of leaves, though it needed some tweaking to optimise its ability to break down plastic. The mutated version managed to degrade a tonne of waste plastic in ten hours. Read more in The Guardian

SpaceX's first launch with humans

Elon Musk's SpaceX started the commercial space flight era by successfully launching a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew Dragon capsule and two Nasa astronauts, Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, to the International Space Station (ISS). The Falcon 9 rocket has previously ferried cargo to orbit, but the trip marks the first private space launch with humans aboard – and the beginning of private space flight, including tourism. Read more at WIRED

Porn starts to consider ethics

Pornhub removed two-thirds of the videos on its site – some ten million clips – after an investigation by the New York Times revealed some of the user-uploaded clips featured children and other abuse, sparking Visa and Mastercard to halt processing payments. From now on, the site will only permit verified users to upload videos, perhaps finally kickstarting an era of ethics in mainstream porn sites. Read more at Motherboard

UK gets its first tech union

United Tech and Allied Workers set up a branch in the UK amid wider activism in the sector in the US, with walkouts at Facebook, Google and Amazon. The aim is to give workers more power to hold their employers to account without having to quit and find another job – not easy during a pandemic. Read more at WIRED

Art sculpture saves train driver

Public transport met public art in dramatic, life-saving fashion when a Rotterdam metro train crashed through buffers at the end of the elevated line in the Dutch city. The driver's carriage was saved from falling the 10m to the ground by a public art installation by Maarten Struijs, propped up by one of two whales' tails. Struijs called the accident "rather poetic" and he's not wrong: the name of the work is Saved by a Whale's Tale. Read more in The Times

Kamala Harris becomes first female vice president

The US has its female vice-president, and she's a woman of colour known to her step-kids as "Momala". In a year of difficult politics, and amid a backdrop of racial tension, the US managed to make a major step forward by electing Kamala Harris as the first female vice-president. Read more pretty much anywhere, but start with the New York Times

Argentina set to legalise abortion

Abortion remains illegal across most of South America, but Argentina is set to become the first large nation and only the fourth on the continent to allow women the right to choose. It follows the lead of Cuba, Uruguay and Guyana, though UN research suggests more than six million abortions still happen in the region each year, the majority of which are unsafe for women. The bill still needs to be approved by the senate later in December. Read more at The Guardian

Endurance runner carries disabled friend to top of Mount Olympus

Eleftheria Tosiou always wanted to scale Mount Olympus, the highest peak in Greece. The wheelchair-bound student reached the goal with the help of her friend, long-distance endurance runner Marios Giannakou, who scaled the 2,917-metre mountain with Tosiou strapped to his back. “I have never done something more beautiful,” said Giannakou. “I think it has completed me as a person.” Read more at Reuters

-- by Nicole Kobie, Friday 18 December 2020

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor

PARIS — A hugely ambitious project to replicate the energy of the sun is entering a critical phase, as scientists and technicians in southern France begin assembling giant parts of a nuclear fusion device, an international experiment aimed to develop the ultimate clean energy source.

World leaders involved in the project, or their representatives, on Tuesday appeared virtually at a ceremony for the start of the new stage of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, noting that work has proceeded despite the COVID-19 pandemic in many of the 35 contributing countries.

“Clearly, the pandemic impacted the initial schedule,” said ITER’s director-general, Bernard Bigot, who led the ceremony at Saint-Paul-les-Durance, northeast of Marseille. He said none of the on-the-ground staff has contracted COVID-19.

Scientists have long sought to mimic the process of nuclear fusion that occurs inside the sun, arguing that it could provide an almost limitless source of cheap, safe and clean electricity. Unlike in existing fission reactors, which split plutonium or uranium atoms, there’s no risk of an uncontrolled chain reaction with fusion and it doesn’t produce long-lived radioactive waste.

The project “seeks to create an artificial sun,” said South Korean President Moon Jae-in. “An artificial sun is an energy source of dreams."

Among other elements, Korea is manufacturing four sectors of a vacuum vessel, a hermetically sealed chamber in which plasma particles, derived from heated hydrogen gas, spiral without touching walls. European countries are building five other sectors.

French President Emmanuel Macron hailed ITER as a “promise of peace” because it brings together countries that decided to forego differences for the “common good.” China, the U.S., India, Russia, South Korea and nations of the European Union are taking part in the project.

There was no sign of the acute discord currently roiling ties between the U.S. and China, and India and China.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a statement read by the Indian ambassador to France, called international collaboration “a perfect symbol of the age-old Indian belief ... (that) the world is one family.”

Bigot compared the milestone phase getting under way to assembling a giant, three dimensional puzzle that “must (have) the precision of a Swiss watch.”

Billed as the world’s largest science project, ITER is gigantic. The circular device, called a tokamak, has a 30-meter circumference, stands 30 meters (100 feet) high, and is made up of more than a million parts constructed in numerous countries.

Some pieces transported to France weigh several hundred tons. Tools to put the reactor together match that size, with giant lifts that must transfer components over the walls and down into “the pit.” A key component being built by the U.S., the Central Solenoid, is the most powerful of ITER’s numerous magnets. Together, they will be strong enough to lift an aircraft carrier.

The project begun in 2006 is far from over. The experimental reactor is to head for another landmark moment in five years, described as a “trial run” when scientists launch what is called “First Plasma” showing that the machine functions, including magnetic fields and other operations.

Bigot, the ITER’s director-general, called fusion energy a “miracle for our planet.”

He said that smaller experiments are complementary to ITER. Bigot predicts a bright future for his international baby, saying he foresees a scaled-up ITER, perhaps twice as large, to provide power to the grid. But its viability and economic competitiveness must first be demonstrated, he said.

The project's estimated cost just for the EU was about 20 billion euros ($23.5 billion), Bigot told reporters. He said a full price tag was difficult to estimate because participating countries make their own contributions.

ncov2019.live / worldometer

[3/28/20] Last week, as cities across the country shut down in an effort to slow the spread of covid-19, President Trump said, “We have a problem that, a month ago, nobody thought about.” Well, somebody did. On December 29th, as Trump vacationed with his family at Mar-a-Lago, Avi Schiffmann, a seventeen-year-old from Washington State, launched a homemade Web site to track the movement of the coronavirus. Since then, the site, ncov2019.live, has had more than a hundred million visitors. “I wanted to just make the data easily accessible, but I never thought it would end up being this big,” the high-school junior said last week over FaceTime. Schiffmann, gap-toothed and bespectacled, was sitting on his bed wearing a blue T-shirt and baggy pajama bottoms. It was late morning. He was at his mother’s house, on Mercer Island, outside Seattle. Somewhere in the room his cat, Louie, mewed. Behind him hung a Ferrari poster.

Using a coding tactic known as “web-scraping,” Schiffmann’s site collates data from different sources around the globe—the W.H.O., the C.D.C., Yonhap News Agency in South Korea—and displays the latest number of covid-19 cases. It features simple graphics and easy-to-read tables divided by nation, continent, and state. Data automatically updates every minute. In a politicized pandemic, where rumor and panic run amok, the site has become a reputable, if unlikely, watchdog.

Schiffmann goes to Mercer Island High School. (Its mascot: Herbert the Snail.) He began teaching himself to code when he was seven, mainly by watching YouTube videos, and has made more than thirty Web sites. “Programming is a great creative medium,” he said. “Instead of using a paintbrush or something, you can just type a bunch of funky words and make a coronavirus site.” One of his first projects, in elementary school, was what he calls “a stick-figure animation hub.” Later sites collated the scores for his county’s high-school sports games, aggregated news of global protests, and displayed the weather forecast on Mars. “His brain is constantly going from one thing to another, which is good, but I also try to focus him in,” his mother, Nathalie Acher, said. “I’m not techy at all myself. I see it as just really boring. He sees it as an art form.”

Schiffmann created the virus project during a family ski weekend in Snoqualmie Pass. Acher, who is a primary-care doctor, said that, when he had finished building it (he’d skipped a ski day), “he was beaming as though he’d discovered the cure for cancer.” Flattening the curve has been an isolating experience for many, but Schiffmann has never had so much attention. “I’m getting e-mail after e-mail,” he said. “Every couple of seconds it’s a new one.” Some people suggest changes to the site. “They’re, like, ‘Great Web site!’ ” he said. “And then they send a massive list of demands, and I’m just, like, ‘O.K., later.’ ”

While his twelfth-grade friends worry about whether the prom will be cancelled, Schiffmann is navigating global fame.“I literally see myself on, like, African news Web sites, Thailand, Taiwan—like, everywhere,” he said. He had two podcast interviews scheduled for that day. Then he was off to a photo shoot. “I want more professional photos, because I don’t like the ones that the news places use.” (“I look weird,” he said.) A few days earlier, his school had shut down. But he had already skipped the last week of classes to focus on the site, he said, “when it kind of blew up.” His mother, whose medical colleagues use the site, had given up coaxing him to return. “Maybe learning algebra can come later,” she said. (Her son is a C student.)

Schiffmann took the virus threat seriously before many others did. “I’ve been kind of concerned for a while, because I watched it spread very fast, and around the entire world. I mean, it just kind of went everywhere.” He took his own precautions. “I got masks a while ago. I got, like, fifteen for seventeen dollars. Now you can’t even buy a single mask for, like, less than forty.” His mother chimed in. “I wish I had listened to him,” she said. “But, in his teen-ager way, he’d come down the stairs with his eyes huge and be, like, ‘There are fifty thousand more cases!’ and I’d be, like, ‘Yeah, but they’re over there, not here.’ ”

Now that the grownups of the world are finally, and appropriately, freaking out, it is hard for Schiffmann not to feel righteous vindication. “If you told someone three months ago that we should spend, like, ten billion dollars in upgrading the United States’ health care, they would have been, like, ‘Nah,’ ” he said. “Now, everyone’s, like, ‘Oh, my God, yes.’ But this is the kind of stuff we should have done a long time ago.”

***

[6/1/20] Have started to use worldometer in addition to nov2019.live.  Some of the data on ncov2019.live (e.g. New York) hasn't been updating recently.  The main worldometer page is also interesting.

There's also a discrepancy with Spain between the two.  ncov2019.live has them at 239,638 cases, while worldometer has them at 286,718.  Johns Hopkins has Spain at 263.638.  So I'll go with ncov2019.live in this case.

a new era in space travel

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A rocket ship built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company thundered away from Earth with two Americans on Saturday, ushering in a new era in commercial space travel and putting the United States back in the business of launching astronauts into orbit from home soil for the first time in nearly a decade.

NASA’s Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken rode skyward aboard a white-and-black, bullet-shaped Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, lifting off at 3:22 p.m. from the same launch pad used to send Apollo crews to the moon a half-century ago. Minutes later, they slipped safely into orbit.

“Let's light this candle,” Hurley said just before ignition, borrowing the historic words used by Alan Shepard on America's first human spaceflight, in 1961.

The two men are scheduled to arrive Sunday at the International Space Station, 250 miles above Earth, for a stay of up to four months, after which they will come home with a Right Stuff-style splashdown at sea, something the world hasn't witnessed since the 1970s.

The mission unfolded amid the gloom of the coronavirus outbreak, which has killed more than 100,000 Americans, and racial unrest across the U.S. over the case of George Floyd, the handcuffed black man who died at the hands of Minneapolis police.

NASA officials and others expressed hope the flight would lift American spirits and show the world what the U.S. can do.

“We are back in the game. It’s very satisfying,” said Doug Marshburn, of Deltona, Florida, who shouted, “USA! USA!" as he watched the 260-foot rocket climb skyward.

SpaceX becomes the first private company to launch people into orbit, a feat achieved previously by only three governments: the U.S., Russia and China.

“This is something that should really get people right in the heart of anyone who has any spirit of exploration,” Musk, the visionary also behind the Tesla electric car company, said after liftoff, pounding his chest with his fist.

The flight also ended a nine-year launch drought for NASA. Ever since it retired the space shuttle in 2011, NASA has relied on Russian spaceships launched from Kazakhstan to take U.S. astronauts to and from the space station.

Over the past few years, NASA outsourced the job of designing and building its next generation of spaceships to SpaceX and Boeing, awarding them $7 billion in contracts in a public-private partnership aimed at driving down costs and spurring innovation. Boeing’s spaceship, the Starliner capsule, is not expected to fly astronauts until early 2021.

NASA plans to rely in part on commercial partners as it pursues it next goals: sending astronauts back to the moon within a few years, and on to Mars in the 2030s.

At a post-liftoff rally held at NASA's massive 525-foot-high Vehicle Assembly Building, President Donald Trump commended Musk and proclaimed: “Today we once again proudly launch American astronauts on American rockets, the best in the world, from right here on American soil.”

He vowed the U.S. will be the first to land on Mars, promising a “future of American dominance in space.”

Vice President Mike Pence, who also witnessed the launch, said that as the nation deals with the coronavirus and racial strife, "I believe with all my heart that millions of Americans today will find the same inspiration and unity of purpose that we found in those days in the 1960s” during Apollo.

The first attempt to launch the rocket, on Wednesday, was called off with less than 17 minutes to go in the countdown because of lightning. On Saturday, stormy weather threatened another postponement for most of the day, but the skies began to clear just in the time.

are we living in The Matrix?

If you, me and every person and thing in the cosmos were actually characters in some giant computer game, we would not necessarily know it. The idea that the universe is a simulation sounds more like the plot of “The Matrix,” but it is also a legitimate scientific hypothesis. In 2016, researchers pondered the controversial notion at the annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate here at the American Museum of Natural History.

A popular argument for the simulation hypothesis came from University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum in 2003, when he suggested that members of an advanced civilization with enormous computing power might decide to run simulations of their ancestors. They would probably have the ability to run many, many such simulations, to the point where the vast majority of minds would actually be artificial ones within such simulations, rather than the original ancestral minds. So simple statistics suggest it is much more likely that we are among the simulated minds.

And there are other reasons to think we might be virtual. For instance, the more we learn about the universe, the more it appears to be based on mathematical laws. Perhaps that is not a given, but a function of the nature of the universe we are living in. “If I were a character in a computer game, I would also discover eventually that the rules seemed completely rigid and mathematical,” said Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “That just reflects the computer code in which it was written.”

coronavirus modeling

As with simulations of Earth’s changing climate or what happens when a nuclear bomb detonates in a city, the goal here is to make an informed prediction—within a range of uncertainty—about the future. When data is sparse, which happens when a virus crosses over into humans for the first time, models can vary widely in terms of assumptions, uncertainties, and conclusions. But governors and task force leads still tout their models from behind podiums, increasingly famous modeling labs release regular reports into the content mills of the press and social media, and policymakers still use models to make decisions. In the case of Covid-19, responding to those models may yet be the difference between global death tolls in the thousands or the millions. Models are imperfect, but they’re better than flying blind—if you use them right.

creating oxygen

from carbon dioxide.

Science fiction stories are chock full of terraforming schemes and oxygen generators for a very good reason—we humans need molecular oxygen (O2) to breathe, and space is essentially devoid of it. Even on other planets with thick atmospheres, O2 is hard to come by.

So, when we explore space, we need to bring our own oxygen supply. That is not ideal because a lot of energy is needed to hoist things into space atop a rocket, and once the supply runs out, it is gone.

One place molecular oxygen does appear outside of Earth is in the wisps of gas streaming off comets. The source of that oxygen remained a mystery until two years ago when Konstantinos P. Giapis, a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech, and his postdoctoral fellow Yunxi Yao, proposed the existence of a new chemical process that could account for its production. Giapis, along with Tom Miller, professor of chemistry, have now demonstrated a new reaction for generating oxygen that Giapis says could help humans explore the universe and perhaps even fight climate change at home. More fundamentally though, he says the reaction represents a new kind of chemistry discovered by studying comets.

Most chemical reactions require energy, which is typically provided as heat. Giapis's research shows that some unusual reactions can occur by providing kinetic energy. When water molecules are shot like extremely tiny bullets onto surfaces containing oxygen, such as sand or rust, the water molecule can rip off that oxygen to produce molecular oxygen. This reaction occurs on comets when water molecules vaporize from the surface and are then accelerated by the solar wind until they crash back into the comet at high speed.

Comets, however, also emit carbon dioxide (CO2). Giapis and Yao wanted to test if CO2 could also produce molecular oxygen in collisions with the comet surface. When they found O2 in the stream of gases coming off the comet, they wanted to confirm that the reaction was similar to water's reaction. They designed an experiment to crash CO2 onto the inert surface of gold foil, which cannot be oxidized and should not produce molecular oxygen. Nonetheless, O2 continued to be emitted from the gold surface. This meant that both atoms of oxygen come from the same CO2 molecule, effectively splitting it in an extraordinary manner.

"At the time we thought it would be impossible to combine the two oxygen atoms of a CO2 molecule together because CO2 is a linear molecule, and you would have to bend the molecule severely for it to work," Giapis says. "You're doing something really drastic to the molecule."

The apparatus Giapis designed to perform the reaction works like a particle accelerator, turning the CO2 molecules into ions by giving them a charge and then accelerating them using an electric field, albeit at much lower energies than are found in a particle accelerator. However, he adds that such a device is not necessary for the reaction to occur.

"You could throw a stone with enough velocity at some CO2 and achieve the same thing," he says. "It would need to be traveling about as fast as a comet or asteroid travels through space."

That could explain the presence of small amounts of oxygen that have been observed high in the Martian atmosphere. There has been speculation that the oxygen is being generated by ultraviolet light from the sun striking CO2, but Giapis believes the oxygen is also generated by high-speed dust particles colliding with CO2 molecules.

He hopes that a variation of his reactor could be used to do the same thing at more useful scales—perhaps one day serving as a source of breathable air for astronauts on Mars or being used to combat climate change by pulling CO2, a greenhouse gas, out of Earth's atmosphere and turning it into oxygen. He acknowledges, however, that both of those applications are a long way off because the current version of the reactor has a low yield, creating only one to two oxygen molecules for every 100 CO2 molecules shot through the accelerator.

global warming, what are the chances?

OSLO (Reuters) - Evidence for man-made global warming has reached a “gold standard” level of certainty, adding pressure for cuts in greenhouse gases to limit rising temperatures, scientists said on Monday.

“Humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals,” the U.S.-led team wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change of satellite measurements of rising temperatures over the past 40 years.

They said confidence that human activities were raising the heat at the Earth’s surface had reached a “five-sigma” level, a statistical gauge meaning there is only a one-in-a-million chance that the signal would appear if there was no warming.

Such a “gold standard” was applied in 2012, for instance, to confirm the discovery of the Higgs boson subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe.

Benjamin Santer, lead author of Monday’s study at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said he hoped the findings would win over skeptics and spur action.

“The narrative out there that scientists don’t know the cause of climate change is wrong,” he told Reuters. “We do.”

Mainstream scientists say the burning of fossil fuels is causing more floods, droughts, heat waves and rising sea levels.

U.S. President Donald Trump has often cast doubt on global warming and plans to pull out of the 197-nation Paris climate agreement which seeks to end the fossil fuel era this century by shifting to cleaner energies such as wind and solar power.

Sixty-two percent of Americans polled in 2018 believed that climate change has a human cause, up from 47 percent in 2013, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Trump vs. science

Among the up-is-down, night-is-day practices of the Trump administration, one of the most dangerous and disturbing is its habit of turning America’s leading science agencies into hives of anti-science policymaking.

A new report lays out how this has produced a “monumental disaster” for science at the Department of the Interior. The report by the Union of Concerned Scientists details how Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and his minions have in the space of two years turned Interior from a steward of public lands and natural resources into a front for the mining and oil and gas industries.

“The intent in rolling back the consideration of science in decision-making is always to progress the development of fossil fuel interests,” Jacob Carter of the union’s center for science and democracy and lead author of the report told me.

This results in cascading negative effects on the agency’s mission. “Under Zinke’s watch, we see a lot of federal lands being opened for sale, which means a lot of endangered species will no longer be protected, and which has damaging consequences for climate,” Carter says.

Interior isn’t the only science agency that has been turned into a billboard for political and ideological propaganda. The Environmental Protection Agency has been similarly hollowed out, and the Department of Health and Human Services has all but abandoned its duty to advance Americans’ access to affordable healthcare.

Interior has taken a multifaceted approach to wiping science out of its policymaking. Zinke and his political appointees have terminated research projects or canceled them before they start. Among the affected studies was one to evaluate the health effects of coal strip mining in Appalachia. Interior shut down a study into how to improve inspections of offshore oil and gas development, which had been requested by Interior itself after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Zinke reassigned dozens of top scientists to make-work jobs out of their fields in an overt effort to goad them into resigning. One was Joel Clement, a forest ecologist who had been a climate science advisor at Interior for seven years, until he was abruptly reassigned to an accounting office that collects royalty checks from fossil fuel companies.

As Clement wrote in a Washington Post op-ed last year, “I believe I was retaliated against for speaking out publicly about the dangers that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities.” He’s one of the co-authors of the Union of Concerned Scientists report.

-- Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times

19 of the G20 nations reaffirm commitment to Paris climate accord

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — Leaders of the world's top economies agreed Saturday to repair the global trading system as they closed a Group of 20 summit that saw the Trump administration at odds with many allies over the Paris accord on climate change and issues like migration.

The joint statement signed by all 20 member nations said 19 of them reaffirmed their commitment to the Paris climate accord, with the United States, which withdrew from the pact under President Donald Trump, the lone holdout. The official communique acknowledged flaws in global commerce and called for reforming the World Trade Organization, but it didn't mention the word "protectionism" after negotiators said that had met resistance from the United States.

Applause broke out in the convention center hall as the leaders, including Trump, signed off on the statement at the end of the two-day summit in the Argentine capital, the first time it has been held in South America.

Grand K being retired

VERSAILLES, France — In a historic vote, nations unanimously approved Friday a ground-breaking overhaul to the international system of measurements, coming together in a way that they fail to do on so many other issues behind new definitions for the kilogram and other key units vital for trade and science.

Scientists for whom the update represents decades of work clapped, cheered and even wept as the 50-plus nations one by one said "yes" or "oui" to the update.

Nobel prize winner William Phillips called it "the greatest revolution in measurement since the French revolution," which ushered in the metric system of meters and kilograms.

The so-called "Grand K" kilogram, a cylinder of polished platinum-iridium alloy that has been the world's sole true kilo since 1889, is to be retired.

Nations gathered in Versailles, west of Paris, instead approved the use of a scientific formula to define the exact weight of a kilogram. Scientists at the meeting were giddy with excitement: some even sported tattoos on their forearms to mark the moment.

The change will have no discernable impact for most people. Their bathroom scales won't get kinder and kilos and grams won't change in supermarkets.

But it will mean redundancy for the Grand K and its six official copies. The new formula-based definition of the kilogram will have multiple advantages over the precision-crafted metal lump that has set the standard for more than a century.

Unlike a physical object, the formula cannot pick up particles of dust, decay with time or be dropped and damaged. It also is expected to be more accurate when measuring very, very small or very, very large masses.

Even in retirement, the "Grand K" and its six official copies — collectively known as "the heir and the spares" — will still be kept in the high-security vault on the outskirts of Paris where they are stored. That's because scientists want to keep on studying them, to see whether their masses gradually change over time.

Only exceedingly rarely have they seen the light of day since 1889, when they were taken out on a very few occasions to check whether other master kilograms that nations around the world use were still accurately calibrated, give or take the mass of a dust particle or two.

The metal kilo is being replaced by a definition based on Planck's constant, which is part of one of the most celebrated equations in physics but also devilishly difficult to explain.

Suffice to say that the updated definition will, in time, spare nations the need to occasionally send their kilos back to France for calibration against the "Grand K." Scientists instead should be able to accurately calculate an exact kilo without having to measure one lump of metal against another.

The only scientist in Congress

Before being elected to Congress in 2008, Representative Bill Foster of Illinois, a Democrat, worked for more than 20 years as a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. Now, as the only member of Congress with a Ph.D. in science, he says there is an urgent need for more scientists in politics.

Does partisan politics limit your ability to raise scientific issues?

In a typical hearing of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology or Financial Services Committee—both of which I am on—you will get three Republican witnesses and a single Democrat. These committee policies are largely at the discretion of the chairman. When you look at simple reforms that would make [Congress] work in a more bipartisan, fact-based way, just having an equal number of witnesses from both sides would be a real step forward. I think it’s incumbent on us, if the Democrats do take over again, that we go out of our way to make sure the rules are not so winner-takes-all.

Politics is very different from science—in science, if you stand up and say something that you know is not true, it is a career-ending move. It used to be that way in politics. It has taken me a while to adjust to politics where, for many who practice it, the question is not “Is it true?” but “What can I convince the voting public is true?” That psychology has bled into politics more than it should.

Steven Hawking

Stephen Hawking, an award-winning physicist and influential author, died early Wednesday morning, a family spokesman told ABC News. He was 76.

Hawking, whose books included "A Brief History of Time" and "The Universe in a Nutshell," was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 1962.

 The family did not disclose the cause of death, but said he “died peacefully” at his home in Cambridge, England.

"We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today. He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years," the family said in a statement. "His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humor inspired people across the world. He once said, 'It would not be much of a universe if it wasn't home to the people you love.' We will miss him forever."

Hawking leaves behind his daughter, Lucy, and two sons, Robert and Tim. They thanked his fans who have "been by Professor Hawking's side –- and supported him -– throughout his life."

Hawking was considered one of the leading voices in science because of his extensive research and work related to understanding the universe.

Here's timeline of Stephen Hawking's life, compiled by the Associated Press:

Jan. 8, 1942 — Born in Oxford, England, the eldest of four children born to Frank Hawking, a biologist, and Isobel Hawking, a medical research secretary.

1952 — Attends St. Albans School.

1959 — Receives scholarship to attend University College, Oxford, from which he graduates with a degree in Natural Science.

1962 — Begins graduate research in cosmology at Cambridge University.

1963 — Diagnosed with the degenerative nerve disorder ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, at the age of 21. He is given two years to live.

Jul. 14, 1965 — Marries his first wife, Jane Wilde, a modern languages student he met at Cambridge.

1967 — The couple's first son, Robert, is born.

1970 — Jane gives birth to a daughter, Lucy.

1974 — Elected as a fellow of the Royal Society at age 32, one of the youngest people to receive the honor.

1979 — Becomes Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a prestigious position once held by Isaac Newton. Hawking holds the post until 2009. Jane gives birth to a third child, Timothy.

1985 — Admitted to a hospital in Geneva with pneumonia. He survives after an operation, but loses what remained of his speech. The next year he begins communicating through the electronic voice synthesizer that gave him his trademark robotic "voice."

1988 — Publishes "A Brief History of Time," a book on cosmology aimed at the general public that becomes an instant best-seller.

1989 — Made a Companion of Honor by Queen Elizabeth II.

1995 — Marries his nurse, Elaine Mason.

2007 — Divorces Elaine Mason.

2014 — Hawking's life is celebrated in the Oscar-winning biopic "The Theory of Everything," based on the memoir "Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen," by Jane Hawking.

a new epoch

Humanity’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared, according to an official expert group who presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town on Monday.

The new epoch should begin about 1950, the experts said, and is likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, although an array of other signals, including plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chicken are now under consideration.

The current epoch, the Holocene, is the 12,000 years of stable climate since the last ice age during which all human civilisation developed. But the striking acceleration since the mid-20th century of carbon dioxide emissions and sea level rise, the global mass extinction of species, and the transformation of land by deforestation and development mark the end of that slice of geological time, the experts argue. The Earth is so profoundly changed that the Holocene must give way to the Anthropocene.

Evidence of the Anthropocene

Human activity has:

Pushed extinction rates of animals and plants far above the long-term average. The Earth is now on course to see 75% of species become extinct in the next few centuries if current trends continue.

Increased levels of climate-warming CO2 in the atmosphere at the fastest rate for 66m years, with fossil-fuel burning pushing levels from 280 parts per million before the industrial revolution to 400ppm and rising today.

Put so much plastic in our waterways and oceans that microplastic particles are now virtually ubiquitous, and plastics will likely leave identifiable fossil records for future generations to discover.

Doubled the nitrogen and phosphorous in our soils in the past century with our fertiliser use. This is likely to be the largest impact on the nitrogen cycle in 2.5bn years.

Left a permanent layer of airborne particulates in sediment and glacial ice such as black carbon from fossil fuel burning.

Bill Gates on Richard Feyman

Thirty years ago I went on vacation and fell for Richard Feynman.

A friend and I were planning a trip together and wanted to mix a little learning in with our relaxation. We looked at a local university’s film collection, saw that they had one of his lectures on physics, and checked it out. We loved it so much that we ended up watching it twice. Feynman had this amazing knack for making physics clear and fun at the same time. I immediately went looking for more of his talks, and I’ve been a big fan ever since. Years later I bought the rights to those lectures and worked with Microsoft to get them posted online for free.


In 1965, Feynman shared a Nobel Prize for work on particle physics. To celebrate the 50^th anniversary of that honor, the California Institute of Technology—where he taught for many years before his death in 1988—asked for some thoughts about what made him so special. Here’s the video I sent:

In that video, I especially love the way Feynman explains how fire works. He takes such obvious delight in knowledge—you can see his face light up. And he makes it so clear that anyone can understand it.

In that sense, Feynman has a lot in common with all the amazing teachers I’ve met in schools across the country. You walk into their classroom and immediately feel the energy—the way they engage their students—and their passion for whatever subject they’re teaching.

-- Bill Gates, 1/27/16

Planet Nine

Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun.

The researchers, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, discovered the planet's existence through mathematical modeling and computer simulations but have not yet observed the object directly.

"This would be a real ninth planet," says Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy. "There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third. It's a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that's still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting."

Brown notes that the putative ninth planet--at 5,000 times the mass of Pluto--is sufficiently large that there should be no debate about whether it is a true planet. Unlike the class of smaller objects now known as dwarf planets, Planet Nine gravitationally dominates its neighborhood of the solar system. In fact, it dominates a region larger than any of the other known planets--a fact that Brown says makes it "the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar system."

Kepler-452b

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.  >> The W.M. Keck telescope on Mauna Kea helped scientists confirm the discovery of  a "close cousin" planet similar to Earth -- orbiting a sun-like star in a zone that might harbor life.

The researchers announced their discovery Thursday based on observations from NASA's Kepler space telescope and ground-based telescopes, including the W.M. Keck Observatory.

"It is the closest thing that we have to another place that somebody else might call home," said Jon Jenkins, the lead data analyst from NASA's Ames Research Center in California.

This older, bigger cousin to Earth is called Kepler-452b. What makes this planet remarkable is that it orbits its star at about the same distance that Earth orbits the sun. What's more, its home star looks to be similar to our sun.

Based on what scientists know today, Jenkins added, "This is the closest thing we have to another Earth-sun twin system."

John Grunsfeld, NASA's science mission chief, said the exoplanet system "as far as we can tell, is a pretty good close cousin to the Earth and our sun." The planet itself is "the closest twin, so to speak, to Earth 2.0" yet found in the Kepler data.

"This is about the closest so far," Grunsfeld said, "and I really emphasize the 'so far.' "

One unanswered question is whether the planet is rocky. Scientists believe there's a better than even chance it is. As for age and size, the planet is about 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than Earth, and 60 percent larger in diameter than our home planet. Its star, Kepler 452, is also older and bigger, as well as brighter than our sun.

Planet 452b takes 385 days to orbit its star, just a little more than Earth takes for a one-year lap. It's just a bit farther from its star than Earth is from our sun.

The planet is in a solar system that is 1,400 light years from our own, located in the Constellation Cygnus, or swan.

"So pack your bags, it's a long trip," joked Jenkins.

CuriosityStream

Discovery Channel founder John Hendricks built his fortune in the cable-TV business, but for years he has been looking to disrupt the industry with a Netflix-like online video offering.

Now, he is doing it. Mr. Hendricks, who retired last year from Discovery’s board, in March will launch CuriosityStream, a subscription video-on-demand service that will offer nonfiction shows about nature, history, science and technology. It will cost between $2.99 and $9.99 a month, depending on the resolution of the picture.


“With the success of Netflix, I just think the timing is right,” he said.


Like Netflix—or, for that matter, many cable channels these days—CuriosityStream will seek to distinguish itself with a handful of ambitious original series, though the bulk of its offerings will be acquired. The service will start out with 800 titles, about half of which will be short-form, roughly eight minutes long.


Unlike Netflix, however, CurosityStream won’t be spending billions on content. “We see our content investment being in the tens of millions,” he said, noting that nonfiction television is generally cheaper than scripted programming. The company plans to co-produce some of its originals, and work with producers such as Britain’s BBC and Japan’s NHK.

Mr. Hendricks, who founded Discovery in 1982, compared this moment in streaming video to the early days of cable, when first movers like HBO and ESPN carved out advantages in movies, sports and other categories. He says he hopes to be the dominant player in the nonfiction category of streaming.

He imagines that his brand of programming will be appealing to about 25% of the television market—“light” TV users that also tend to watch PBS. At the moment, he is aiming at people without pay-TV subscriptions, a market he estimates includes about 17 million households. But he also believes that about 10% of the roughly 100 million pay-TV households would like CuriosityStream on top of what they are already paying for.


Ultimately, he hopes to sign up between five million and seven million subscribers in two to five years, and get to 15 million to 20 million in a decade.

[I saw him on CNBC today, but this story is from January.  Ah, it launched today.]

 John Hendricks, the Founder of the Discovery Channel and former Chairman of Discovery Communications, announced the launch of his new, independent venture, CuriosityStream, the world's first ad-free subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) service for consumers to watch premium factual programs anytime, anywhere. The service goes live at 6am ET today and curious people across the U.S. with broadband connections can sign up to instantly watch choice content from hundreds of enriching and engaging shows.

CuriosityStream takes Hendricks's vision of accessible and curated factual programs to the social media generation with the latest technology and content focused on science, technology, civilization and the human spirit. The service is designed to enable viewers to choose their viewing experience, from a range of resolutions to custom search features that allow viewers to take virtual journeys through the topics of their choice.

"My dream of a content-on-demand service that uses advanced media to empower the enduring human desire to understand the Universe and the world around us is now a reality. CuriosityStream is the world's first ad-free, SVOD service that addresses our lifelong quest to learn, explore, and understand. Our aim is to provide the first and best on-demand video streaming destination that aggregates and curates the world's best factual content," said Hendricks.

For just $2.99 a month, CuriosityStream subscribers can access premium programming on internet-connected TVs, smartphones, tablets, set top boxes and additional devices. The service is currently priced to host and deliver three streaming resolution preferences: Standard Resolution ($2.99 per month), HD Resolution ($5.99 per month), and later this year we will offer 4K Resolution.

CuriosityStream is launching with hundreds of hours of original and acquired programming that aims to engage and enlighten knowledge seekers of all ages, with new titles being added weekly. Engaging short-form content, generally less than 8 minutes in length, will comprise a significant part of the curated CuriosityStream library.


CuriosityStream features original commissions, original series and specials and documentary content from the world's leading nonfiction producers, including the BBC, NHK, ZED, Terra Noa, and Flame Distribution. Additionally, CuriosityStream features exclusive access to segments and full interviews from more than 70 world experts profiling a broad range of subjects from evolution to rock stars, with 25 new interviews added each month. Initially launching in the U.S., CuriosityStream will be available worldwide over the next five years.

[I don't know how many will sign up with similar content available on PBS, Netflix, Hulu, etc.]