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n2doc's JournalVenus’ Winds Are Mysteriously Speeding Up
High-altitude winds on neighboring Venus have long been known to be quite speedy, whipping sulfuric-acid-laden clouds around the superheated planet at speeds well over 300 km/h (180 mph). And after over six years collecting data from orbit, ESA’s Venus Express has found that the winds there are steadily getting faster… and scientists really don’t know why.
By tracking the movements of distinct features in Venus’ cloud tops at an altitude of 70 km (43 miles) over a period of six years — which is 10 of Venus’ years — scientists have been able to monitor patterns in long-term global wind speeds.
What two separate studies have found is a rising trend in high-altitude wind speeds in a broad swath south of Venus’ equator, from around 300 km/h when Venus Express first entered orbit in 2006 to 400 km/h (250 mph) in 2012. That’s nearly double the wind speeds found in a category 4 hurricane here on Earth!
“This is an enormous increase in the already high wind speeds known in the atmosphere. Such a large variation has never before been observed on Venus, and we do not yet understand why this occurred,” said Igor Khatuntsev from the Space Research Institute in Moscow and lead author of a paper to be published in the journal Icarus.
Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/103001/venus-winds-are-mysteriously-speeding-up/#ixzz2Wc00mGOs
Uranus Is Being Chased By Trojans!
As Uranus speeds in its orbit in the solar system, there are three large space rocks that are in lockstep with the gas giant, according to new simulations. Two of them are wobbling in unstable “horseshoe” orbits near Uranus, while the third is in a more reliable Trojan orbit that is always 60 degrees in front of the planet.
The largest of this small group is the asteroid Crantor, which is 44 miles (70 kilometers) wide. Its horseshoe orbit, and that of companion 2010 EU65, means the space rocks seesaw between being close to Uranus and further away. They should stay in that configuration for a few million years.
The last of the group is 2011 QF99, in a Trojan orbit near one of Uranus’ Lagrangian points — sort of like a celestial parking spot where an object can hang out without undue influence from the balanced gravitational forces.
Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/103002/uranus-is-being-chased-by-asteroids/
There’s rat poison in my milk? or, why everything is toxic
Puff the Mutant Dragon
Adventures in science.
WOULD you like to eat rat poison? Probably not, but that’s OK, because you’ve eaten it already. Most milk in the United States has rat poison added to it. If you find this disturbing, you can always start reading ingredient lists and don’t buy milk that has rat poison in it. You won’t see “rat poison” as such on the label, however, because manufacturers generally call it by its other name instead.
The other name for rat poison is Vitamin D.
Believe it or not, vitamin D is often used to kill rats. (Not the only chemical used to do that, of course, but a common one.) It’s completely tasteless so rats keep eating bait laced with vitamin D without ever realizing they’re getting hit with a huge huge huge overdose. This might sound bizarre because most of us think of vitamin D as an essential nutrient. And it is. But anything — even an essential nutrient — is potentially toxic if you eat, drink or inhale too much.
I’m often frustrated by the way people talk and think about “chemicals”. I see “chemical-free” products on sale at the supermarket and I wonder what that means. I hear protesters demand that industry stop putting “synthetic chemicals” into our children’s bodies and I wonder if they know what that means or if they know what they’re talking about. Because they think that synthetic chemicals are dangerous, and many of them are. But so is the grilled meat you barbecue on the Fourth of July. Because grilled meat is carcinogenic. I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect it’s probably the second most carcinogenic thing in your home right after the log fire in your fireplace, which (unless you smoke cigarettes or use asbestos) is probably the most carcinogenic thing you have around. Although people don’t realize it, fireplace smoke contains most of the same carcinogens as the fumes from a lit cigarette. But nobody wants to ban grilled meat and log fires, because grilled meat and log fires seem natural. They seem safe.
Which just goes to show how deceptive appearances can be.
more
http://puffthemutantdragon.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/theres-rat-poison-in-my-milk-or-why-everything-is-toxic-even-kombucha-tea/
The last telegram ever is about to be sent
By Harold Maass | 10:58am
On July 14, someone somewhere in India will tap out what is being called the world's last telegram. India's state-owned telecom company, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, has been holding out as other countries around the world retire their antiquated telegraph services. Now, after delaying the move for two years, the business operating what is considered to be the world's last telegraph service is finally ready to pull the plug, saying telegrams are no longer commercially viable in the age of digital communications.
India's telegram service had been upgraded in recent years — clerks now type up messages on computers to be sent via telegraph, instead of using Morse code. But it still didn't work. "We were incurring losses of over $23 million a year because [text messaging] and smartphones have rendered this service redundant," Shamim Akhtar, general manager of BSNL's telegraph services, tells The Christian Science Monitor. There are still some private companies that offer telegram-style message message services. But the closing of India's state service is being called the end of the telegraph era.
Of course, few people are shocked that India is giving up on a technology that got its start nearly 170 years ago, when Samuel Morse sent the first telegraph message in Washington in 1844. "We're not sure if it's more surprising to learn that the last telegram in the world will be sent next month... or that people are still sending telegrams somewhere," says Ruth Brown at Newser.
Others are taking a different lesson from this telegram news. Matthew Yglesias notes at Slate that India lags far behind most countries in cell-phone use — just 26 percent of the population owned mobile phones last year. "All in all a valuable reminder," Yglesias says, "that alongside the thriving wired India you read about in Tom Friedman columns there's a vast and still overwhelmingly rural and low-tech country out there."
more
http://theweek.com/article/index/245752/the-last-telegram-ever-is-about-to-be-sent
Watch the Shockwave of an Explosion at Mexico’s Popocatépetl
Volcanism at Mexico’s Popocatépetl is highly punctuated, especially during its current level of activity where domes of lava grow in the summit crater. These domes occasionally collapse or are destroyed by explosions that can lessen the pressure on the magma beneath to create an even larger explosion. This is akin to popping the top off a shaken bottle of soda — the dissolved bubbles come out of solution rapidly as the pressure is released and you get an explosion of soda.
Today, Popocatépetl had one of those explosions, and thanks to the beautiful weather in Mexico and some nice placement of webcams surrounding the volcano, the explosion was caught on some pretty amazing webcam footage compiled by webcamsdemexico (see above). The video is short, only 30 second long, but after the first few seconds of calm, the explosion occurs, sending a dark grey plume into the atmosphere above the volcano. Now, these explosions come with a lot of force, and you can see after the initial explosion is how the clouds of water vapor around Popocatepetl shudder as the explosion front moves past. Then quickly, the upper flanks of the volcano turn grey from the rapid raining out of ash and volcanic debris (tephra). It is a little surprising how little the clouds actually care that the explosion just occurred at first, but as the explosion continues in this sped up video, the clouds do begin to show more disruption from the hot ash and volcanic gases being released during the explosion. You can also notice how the plume reaches neutral buoyancy not too far above the volcano (bigger the explosion, the higher it can reach before this happens) as the plume begins to spread laterally (to the right in this video) into that classic shape. My guess is the plume was a few kilometers tall by the time the video ends.
You can see how pulsatory the eruption is as well, with the dark plume churning like steam from a steam engine. This might be due to new magma rising in the conduit, feeding the eruption as it continues. However, even with all this fury, the volcano went back to looking idyllic with only some minor puffs of ash within two hours after the explosion (see below) and only the grey ash on the slopes to show for the seemingly giant explosion. Even as impressive as that explosion seems, these ash and tephra deposits usually are wiped clean out of much of the geologic record by rains as they are only a few centimeters thick near the volcano and millimeters thick further away.
more
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/06/watch-the-shockwave-of-an-explosion-at-mexicos-popocatepetl/
Mysterious Subatomic Particle May Represent Exotic New Form of Matter
BY ADAM MANN
06.17.13
In the course of exploring the properties of a strange subatomic particle, physicists may have stumbled upon something even stranger: a mysterious and exotic new form of matter.
The intriguing discovery was made more or less simultaneously by two collaborations: the Belle experiment at the Japanese High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) and BESIII experiment run by the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in China.
Both teams were looking at a particle called Y(4260) that had been discovered in 2005 but whose nature has mystified researchers since. By smashing together electrons and their antiparticle, positrons, the experiments produced large numbers of Y(4260), which lives for only 10-23 seconds before falling apart into other particles. The teams noticed that their data had a peculiar bump around 3.9 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), an energy corresponding to roughly four times the weight of a proton.
“Inspired by this discovery, we decided to further study the Y(4260) decay, which indeed did not disappoint us,” said particle physicist Zhiqing Liu, lead author of a paper from the Belle experiment that appeared in Physical Review Letters on June 17. A second paper from BESIII, of which Liu is also a member, appears in the same issue.
more
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/06/four-quark-particle/
Earliest use of chocolate in North America discovered
Some strange pottery found at an ancient settlement in southeastern Utah contains the oldest known traces of chocolate in the United States, an anthropologist says.
The site dates back to the 8th century -- 200 years earlier than the only other known evidence of the food, found at Chaco Canyon, the famous ceremonial and trade center of the Ancestral Puebloans.
The residents of the Utah settlement, known as Alkali Ridge, were also Pueblo ancestors, but the chocolate found in so many of their jars, pitchers, and bowls -- as well as the pottery itself -- suggests that they might not have been alone.
Dr. Dorothy Washburn, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, studied the residues in 18 vessels first unearthed at one of the settlement's sites in the 1930s. She and her team -- including her husband, a chemist for Bristol-Meyers Squibb -- found that 13 of the artifacts contained traces of cacao, also known as cocoa.
The tell was a chemical called theobromine, a compound like caffeine that cacao has in abundance. The only other plant in North America that produces theobromine is Ilex vomitoria, a toxic holly that some Midwestern cultures used to induce ritual vomiting.
But the holly, Washburn said, is only found in the Southeastern United States, whereas cacao was a known staple of life and trade in Mesoamerica.
"The only conclusion can be that it’s cacao," she said.
more
http://westerndigs.blogspot.com/2013/06/earliest-use-of-chocolate-in-america.html
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