Systems that create energy from human fecal matter are not new. The idea has been around for a while now, yet never efficiently enough to spawn serious use. The mechanism is called a “microbial fuel cell” (or MFC for short) and it basically uses live electrogenic bacteria that create electricity using the organic material from human byproduct. Generally this sort of system demands an initial power source, driving the production cost considerably higher.

Another idea that has been around for a while is the photoelectrochemical cell (or a PEC) which uses sunlight to separate water into pure hydrogen and oxygen. Similar to MFCs, PECs also necessitate an initial power source causing the same disadvantages. The innovation brought by Yat Li’s research group comes from the synthesis of these two mechanisms to create a “hybrid solar-microbial device”.

By combining the two systems, no supplemental power source is necessary and the average hydrogen gas output is greatly improved. The mechanism works essentially the same as either component would by itself. Electrogenic bacteria begin the process by breaking down organic material in one container, which creates an electrical charge simultaneously. This electricity is used to expedite the electrolysis of water, which occurs in another container with the help of solar energy.

(This is an image of the first hybrid solar-microbial system. http://scitechdaily.com/images/Newly-Device-Uses-Sunlight-and-Wastewater-to-Produce-Hydrogen-Gas.jpg)

The utility and relevance of this creation are extremely prevalent. Aside from the obvious benefits of pursuing reliable and sustainable clean energy, this solution also addresses the issue of waste management. Essentially, the mechanism kills two birds with one stone. The creators of the device are eager to take it to the next step commercially. A much larger scale version is in the workings to be tested on a citywide level.

Source:

University of California – Santa Cruz. “New device harnesses sun and sewage to produce hydrogen fuel.” ScienceDaily, 10 Oct. 2013. Web. 11 Oct. 2013.

Ok, not exactly physics related, but here’s something I found when I was trawling through some science articles today: Neanderthals used to eat stomach goop. Recent evidence collected from the nearly fossilized tartar build-up on the surface of Neanderthal teeth indicates that our hairy cousins used to eat the partly-digested contents of porcupine stomachs. Gross right?

Well not to most people, as it turns out. Stomach contents, referred to nowadays as “chyme”, is actually considered a delicacy in many countries. It is, in fact, still served in Rome, in the dish called rigatoni con la Pajata which consists of pasta and segments of calf-liver with the contents left in. Also, until at least the 1890s the Inuit people of Canada and Alaska ate reindeer chyme, fresh out of their hunting kills, as reported by a Norwegian explorer who also reported that the stuff was actually fairly consumable, and had the consistency of a lumpy stew. It’s no surprise, then, that Neanderthal’s palate would have taken just as quickly to such a source of sustinence. However, upon further examination, something rather surprising was discovered. Apparently the cave-men weren’t dining on porcupine chyme just for the interesting flavor.

As it turns out, the contents of the average porcupine diet contain medicinal ingredients. Plants such as yarrow and chamomile, which are typically known to be either inedible or at least unpalatable, were found in tartar build-up, suggesting that the Neanderthals might have sought out porcupines for self-medication rather than simple snacking. The Inuit’s also seemed to consume chyme not just for the calories, but because it reindeer stomachs are a source of plant matter in a fairly plantless landscape. Rather than hunting the green stuff across the tundra themselves, they let the reindeer do the hard work and then harvested the veggies along with the rest of the deer.

Although it might initially sound repulsive, the more you think about it the more stomach goop seems to be a pretty reasonable and not altogether inconceivable meal choice. Not to say I’m about to make any serious changes to my diet. I just thought it was interesting to see the relationships that resulted in such an indirect kink in the food chain. 

Although difficult to express  in this medium, that title should be accompanied by quite a bit of sarcasm and cynicism. I recently read an article entitled “The Ethics of Climate Change” which discussed largely the economic and business ethics side of global climate change. And I can’t say I agreed with it. In fact it annoyed me quite a lot. In the article, the author talks about weighing the potential costs against the potential benefits. But when this is the kind of thinking that we are employing  on an issue like this, especially when we are pouring literally billions each year into destroying this planet (people and all), then something needs to change.

Now, of course I realize that businesses are most likely to make a big change in climate change efforts in this country. Where the money is is always where the major players are. And what they’re most likely to listen to, most of the time, is how dumping money into climate change efforts is going to effect them, in which case the previously mentioned article might be on the right track. But this is not how it should be. The fact that our planet is slowly dying should be enough to give them pause. So should the fact that an estimated 5 million people die each year due to the effects of climate change and fossil fuels.

5 million.

7.6 million is the number of people killed by cancer each year.

If that isn’t enough to get through to anybody, then it might be a lost cause… As of now, this is the only planet that we have that is habitable. And as far as we know, we are the only life, let alone intelligent life, in the universe. So it seems irresponsible, if not downright idiotic, to just “let the next generation deal with it”. It shouldn’t matter what is going on in the world, what war we’ve gotten ourselves in to, or what economic throes we are currently in. You can’t put a cost/ benefit analysis on the longevity of the human race. No one can just ignore the death of future generations. And perhaps this is because they don’t have to. They aren’t even made aware of it.

The other major problem with climate change philosophy is public awareness. Compared to other countries, the effort to fight climate change in the United States is just sad. The people who are actually aware of the seriousness of the issue generally don’t have the power or voice to make enough of an impact. The ones who do for some reason like to keep it a secret and ignore its existence. (Remember the whole climate change is a myth thing…) And to me, this just doesn’t make sense.

What I do think is that we need a complete overhaul of how we view climate change and what we are doing about it. If we don’t, we will never make any real progress.

When humans finally create a reliable, safe and speedy method of travel, which is quite inevitable; what will be our first destination? With 7 planets (other than Earth) that orbit the Sun, and many more moons that orbit these planets, there are almost too many options. Clearly, if our goal is to find evidence of extraterrestrial life, some of these bodies have significantly better prospects than others. So which planets/moons in our solar system are habitable enough for it to be worth our time to do some research there?

The most obvious answer is Mars. For hundreds of years, humans have pondered the possibility of us having Martian neighbors, and some (namely Percival Lowell) even became convinced that advanced civilizations inhabited the cold, barren planet. By now, technology has advanced to a point where we can easily disprove this; we have even put multiple landers on the surface of Mars, and none of them have observed any evidence of advanced organisms. However, life does not only exist in the form of super-evolved organisms capable of advanced intelligence. Instead, the best chance we have for searching for life on other planetary bodies lies in finding microbial life. Since microbes can survive in a much wider range of conditions than lifeforms like humans can, they could potentially survive in conditions that seem extremely hostile to us… Like on Mars. While Mars is extremely cold, it does actually have water (which is, of course, one of the essentials for life), just not in liquid form. Mars has nearly no atmosphere as a result of its relatively small size/gravity and solar stripping, so its atmospheric pressure is extremely low. Because of this, on Mars water goes directly from its water ice phase to its gaseous state, and never has an intermediate liquid phase. While this does diminish the likelihood of finding Martian life, Mars’ internal heat probably keeps water liquid at certain altitudes, all of which are below the surface. On top of this, it is theorized that Mars was warm enough 2-3 billion years ago to have had abundant flowing water on its surface, and as the Sun brightens with age, Mars will again enter the habitable zone (pictured below) in the future.

After several hundred million years, Mars will enter our conservative prediction of where the habitable zone will be

As you can see, both Mars’ proximity to Earth and much of our scientific analysis of the planet makes our neighbor one of the leading candidates for extraterrestrial life in our solar system.

The other place we would search for life, although it is much further away, is Europa, the second moon of Jupiter. Because liquid water is one of the main requirements for life in the universe, planetary bodies with oceans offer great potential locations to search for life. It is this reason that makes Europa such an exciting place to look for life. Europa’s surface consists almost entirely of solid water ice, and as a result is extremely cold. While prospects for life on Europa’s icy, desert-like surface are small, it is thought that this Galilean moon harbors a salty subsurface ocean many kilometers under its icy surface. There are a few reasons why astronomers theorize the existence of this ocean, the most important of which is the way that cracks on Europa’s icy surface seem to fit together. There are many rifts in the ice of the surface, which can be seen in the picture below, and each of these rifts seems like it might form a sort of jigsaw puzzle with the pieces around it.

The cracks in the ice likely represent places where masses of ice have broken apart, shifted as a result of the water they temporarily float in, and finally re-frozen

It is for this reason that astronomers believe that liquid water occasionally swells up from the ocean below to both repave the icy surface and to cause masses of ice to shift apart from each other, then re-freeze in place. This seems like fairly convincing evidence of a subsurface ocean, but there is one more detail that makes the existence of the ocean even more likely. The Galileo orbiter discovered that Europa is able to interact slightly with Jupiter’s magnetic field. This is only possible if there is some conductive material under the surface of Europa, and a salty subsurface ocean would offer a perfect example of this. These two lines of evidence go together to make a fairly convincing argument that Europa at least has a subsurface ocean. There is not yet any evidence of extraterrestrial life on this moon of Jupiter (which, if it exists, would probably be in the form of microbial/primordial life because of the moon’s distance from the Sun), but the potential existence of an ocean makes Europa one of the leading candidates for places to look for extraterrestrial life in our solar system.

It may be hundreds, even thousands of years before we get to thoroughly investigate other planetary bodies in our solar system for life. However, when our technologies have advanced to a point where interplanetary travel is fairly easy, Mars and Europa will likely be two of the locations where we begin our search for aliens.

On October 8, the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics were announced. Peter W. Higgs and François Englert, two theoretical physicists, were awarded the prize for their contributions to the Standard Model of physics and the prediction of the Higgs Boson.

Peter W. Higgs, right, and François Englert at a conference in Switzerland on July 4, 2012. Fabrice Coffini/ A.F.P. via the New York Times. 

In 1964, six scientists came up with a theory of how matter is imbued with mass. Their thinking was that we all live in an “energy soup” called the Higgs field (named after the physicist who proposed the idea). When particles move through the field, they gain mass. Without it, everything would move at the speed of light and atoms would never have formed (everything would basically act as a photon, which carries no mass).

Computer simulation of particle traces from an LHC collision in which a Higgs Boson is produced. (c) CERN. Image credit: Lucas Taylor via the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

This idea had one catch: if this were true, the field would produce an elusive particle that would only exist for miniscule fractions of a second. This particle thus named the Higgs Boson. The only problem was that, although Higgs was able to describe it as a spinless particle that popped in and out of existence, he had no idea how massive it would be which made it almost impossible to detect.

Despite this roadblock, the theory was added to the standard model: a series of equations that govern how the universe works. It was effectively able to link the weak nuclear force with electromagnetic force and make other progress in particle physics, yet its existence was never confirmed. It made sense, yet no one was able to prove it was true.

Video about the Higgs Boson: http://nyti.ms/15lfeTZ

This sparked a 40 year long search. For decades, researches smashed particles together in colliders, trying to detect the mysterious speck. At times, data was thought to indicate its presence, but it was never strong enough to be proved. It was infamously named the “God Particle” by the news media after a permutation of physicist Leon Lederman’s calling it the “goddamn particle” (because it was so hard to find).

Calling it the God Particle was actually somewhat accurate. Its discovery would hopefully allow scientists to uncover mysteries such as the nature of dark matter and dark energy and why the universe is expanding. Questions such as why the universe is made up of matter instead of antimatter might be answered. Studying it might also shed light on our future and the end of the universe.

Scientists in Geneva applauded the discovery of a subatomic particle that looks like the Higgs boson. Photo credit: Denis Balibouse via the New York Times.

Finally, after years of searching, on July 2, 2012, the discovery of the Higgs Boson was announced in Geneva, Switzerland. Two teams of researchers, one using the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research and another at Fermilab in Illinois were finally able to confirm its existence after analyzing data from years of collisions. They had previously found “Higgslike” particles, but could never confirm that it was the Higgs itself. Finally they had detected a particle and had been able to measure its mass at about 126 billion electron volts. It was confirmed to be the Higgs!!!

This announcement validated what scientists had had faith in for 40 years. The two surviving members of the original team, Englert and Higgs, were proved correct! The announcement was so overwhelming, Higgs went off on a week long sabbatical without telling anyone where he was going to take in the news (he never expected its existence to be confirmed during his lifetime)! Because of their astounding prediction, they were awarded the Nobel Prize. They will be honored in Stockholm with a $1.2 million prize (which, when you think about it, isn’t all that much for a whole lifetime of dedication to an idea). Congratulations to all involved!

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/science/englert-and-higgs-win-nobel-physics-prize.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/science/cern-physicists-may-have-discovered-higgs-boson-particle.html?pagewanted=1

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/higgs_boson/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier

One subject that seems to keep coming up in class is dark energy or dark matter. I had only briefly heard about these concepts before recently. So what exactly are dark matter and dark energy? According to the Cornell astronomy department here is the break down of our universe; 0.03% heavy elements, 0.3% neutrinos, 0.5% stars, 4% free hydrogen and helium, 25% dark matter, and 70% dark energy. So the two “darks” definitely make up a large majority, but what exactly do the two effect? Before I continue I want to clarify that both dark energy and dark matter are hypotheses unconfirmed from direct observation, but thought to exist due to inference from other observable aspects of our universe.

Visualization of the Breakdown

For the past eighty years we have known the universe is expanding. According to our understanding of gravity, the universe’s expansion should be slowing down due to objects pulling on each other. After scientists Perlmutter, Schmidt, and Riess independently discovered the universe’s expansion was accelerating in 1998 they were quite surprised. There need be something out there causing this acceleration. Some type anti-gravity effect, which is now commonly referred to as dark energy. So dark energy is basically just a name given to explain the acceleration of the universe expanding, but that doesn’t tell us exactly what it is. The two main ideas as to what dark energy really is are the cosmological constant and quintessence. The concept of a cosmological constant is concept that Einstein originally came up with, which in simple terms means that  “a volume of space has some intrinsic, fundamental energy” or vacuum energy. The actual cold hard number is though to be around 10^−29 g/cm^3. There are some serious discrepancies with this explanation. The largest being that quantum theory predicts a cosmological constant that is 100 times larger. Quintessence explains dark energy by saying there is a field all through out space and that the potential energy generated by this field is what causes the acceleration of the universe. The only issue? Currently there is no solid evidence to support this hypothesis. In the end we still know very little about dark energy, but research on the topic is on going.

Now how about that dark matter. The galaxy we live in along with all others would rip apart and fly out into space if it wasn’t for the gravity holding them together. This gravity is caused by the mass of things such as stars, planets, and of course black holes, but according to calculations there is no where near enough mass in galaxy’s to keep them together. So there must be some unobservable other mass accounting for the extra gravity hold galaxies together. This unseen mass is called dark matter and it accounts for 84.5% of the total matter in our universe.

Something else to consider is that our understanding of gravity and  maybe completely wrong and that we are like the fish looking out through their bowl, with an incomplete view of their world. In this case dark energy and dark matter could just be a part of gravity we haven’t worked into our model yet. We’ll leave that to the scientists to figure out. More realistically (or not) we will find a way to directly detect the two or more accurately study them so their existence can be proven once and for all.

Sources:

http://www.space.com/20929-dark-energy.html

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=634

http://www.lsst.org/lsst/public/dark_energy

A very young planet with a couple of unique characteristics was spotted using a telescope in Hawaii. The planet is only about 12 million years old, and seems to resemble Jovian planets like those in our solar system. The biggest difference being that “PSO J318.5-22” does not appear to have a host star, or anything to orbit at all. A planet has never been found appearing to remain still in space, therefore this discovery opens the door to a whole new conception of what is possible in the universe.

The planet, PSO J318.5-22, is comparable to an extremely young Jupiter, which makes it a valuable research subject. It could provide us with insight into the baby years of gas giants. Now you might wonder why this distant planet is an advantageous research opportunity, and it has to do with the lack of gravitational orbit. Because PSO is not orbiting any host star, it is easier to study with ‘direct imaging’ than other directly imaged objects because usually the host star’s luminosity disrupts data.

After years of detecting the planet’s position, it was resolved that PSO was created by a “moving group” of baby stars that match PSO in age. It is unclear what the exact process was that created this planet and caused it to end up so far out of orbit.

Source:

Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “A strange lonely planet found without a star.” ScienceDaily, 9 Oct. 2013. Web. 10 Oct. 2013.

In a talk delivered on Monday, the speaker elaborated on the evolving state of the Earth’s ecosystem.  The majority of his talk was focused on the constant degradation of the natural environment and the consequential effects on the native animal species.

As a resident of California, I was disturbed to hear that the famous California Grizzly Bear actually doesn’t reside in California anymore.  In fact, a species that was native to California, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Washington has been restricted more and more until now it only can be found wild in parts of Montana like Yosemite Park and western Canada.  Sadly, only 500-600 California Grizzly Bears actually live in Yosemite Park, an infinitesimal number compared to the population size a century ago.  The simple fact is that these animals are constricted because of our need to expand.  Now I’m not going to go on a rant blaming human ignorance and arrogance for this, but just consider how we affect them.

California Grizzly Bears are not the only species affected by human expansion.  Down on the border between Arizona and Mexico, relatives of deer are being blocked from their migration path by a 15-foot-high wall that is ironically more effective at stopping animals than humans.  Other migration paths, in Montana for example, are cut off by expansive inter-state highways and railways.  With the frequency of trains exceeding 4 dozen a day, incidents of groups of animals dying while waiting for an opportunity to cross the tracks are becoming more and more frequent.

An concept of an animal highway crossing.  Source: Web Ecoist

For human infrastructure that has overrun migratory paths in use for thousands of year s, plans to build an artificial crossing for native species.  The above picture is a concept art for a new crossing, but it bears many similarities to already constructed ones.  These bridges are a simple, cost-effective (relative to the total budget), and effectively solve one of the greatest problems facing the animal kingdom at the moment.

I never really understood the gravity that animal species were being effected by human expansion.  Hopefully we will see some changes soon that can help reduce the problems we’ve created for them.

After going to a talk about National Parks and Animal Preservations, I have to say that a lot of us have an idea that human footprints are doing a lot of damage to many species, but the scale of the aftermath is mostly mistaken. We largely see it under a much more underwhelming light than the naked truth. The thing is, even the smallest things can affect a whole colony of birds or deer from migrating or moving to other parts of a forest. One thing that the speaker said that stuck with me was that a simple road could affect how bears survive in a forest. When you think of the number of highways Going North-South and East-West, all across the country, You release what humanity has done to Nature. The speaker then lead on to say that we need large spaces, bigger national parks and preservations for these species. Even Yellowstone Nation Park, one of America’s cornerstone landmarks and tourist attractions is too small. By tracking 10 bears in the National Park, they realized that a lot of the bears left the boundaries of the National Park, meaning that it needs to be expanded. They are still caged. Just because it’s a big cage does not make the bear free to roam and survive under its natural means.

A quote from The Newsroom summarizes our order of actions fairly well, “The first rule of solving a problem is recognizing that there is one.” And the speaker himself used a Wayne Gretzky quote, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” To solve this animal crisis, we have to recognize, anticipate and adapt. We have to alert our congressmen and the big corps to join in together to protect these ever trimming numbers of animals. We have to give back to Nature what we took from it. Even when we’re not trying, we’ve already begun the process. In the past decade, a lot of people from rural areas have to moving into the city, and animals have actually began to inhabit these areas. In a way, Nature has actually been de-urbanizing these past human populated areas. If we can artificially stimulate these processes, we could truly protect the endangered species out there.

One of the most difficult things about space travel is building a craft capable of traveling to far away parts of the solar system or galaxy. The cost of these missions is astronomical, (no pun intended) especially when you talk about traveling outside the solar system. Perhaps we could change that. In order to travel effectively to far away parts of the galaxy we must find a way to achieve a speed that is a significant fraction of the speed of light. One way to do that is by using solar sails. Solar sails use what is sometimes called “solar wind” to propel space craft. Solar wind is a kind of radiation given off by stars that is capable of exerting a physical force on objects. In fact, solar wind is the reason Mars no longer has an atmosphere, as it push all the atoms out of Mars gravitational pull.

Solar sails would be ideal because, first of all the would exert an acceleration force on a space craft, which would maintain that speed given the lack of friction in space, and secondly because solar wind, unlike rocket fuel, is free. by harnessing the suns solar wind we could easily accelerate a spacecraft to another star, where it would accelerate even more. This process would continue until the ship had reached a significant fraction of the speed of light.

Solar sails may seem like an incredibly new idea, but the idea has in fact been around for hundreds of years. Johan Kepler first eluded to the idea in the early 1600’s in a letter to Galileo after he discovered that comet tails are caused by solar radiation. He said that it may one day be possible to harness this energy for the purpose of space travel.

There are a few draw backs to solar sails however. For one thing, they would have to be incredibly massive to accumulate enough energy from solar wind to accelerate them a significant amount. Secondly, building something this large would be incredibly expensive, perhaps even more so than fueling a rocket. However, when it comes time to put human beings on long space journeys, unless some new invention comes to the fore front, I believe solar sails provide the best option.