Goodbye Global Warming

The Space and Science Research Center, (SSRC) in Orlando, Florida announces that it has confirmed the recent web announcement of NASA solar physicists that there are substantial changes occurring in the sun’s surface. The SSRC has further researched these changes and has concluded they will bring about the next climate change to one of a long lasting cold era.

Today, Director of the SSRC, John Casey has reaffirmed earlier research he led that independently discovered the sun’s changes are the result of a family of cycles that bring about climate shifts from cold climate to warm and back again.

“We today confirm the recent announcement by NASA that there are historic and important changes taking place on the sun’s surface. This will have only one outcome - a new climate change is coming that will bring an extended period of deep cold to the planet. This is not however a unique event for the planet although it is critically important news to this and the next generations. It is but the normal sequence of alternating climate changes that has been going on for thousands of years. Further according to our research, this series of solar cycles are so predictable that they can be used to roughly forecast the next series of climate changes many decades in advance. I have verified the accuracy of these cycles’ behavior over the last 1,100 years relative to temperatures on Earth, to well over 90%.”

As to what these changes are Casey says, “The sun’s surface flows have slowed dramatically as NASA has indicated. This process of surface movement, what NASA calls the “conveyor belt” essentially sweeps up old sunspots and deposits new ones. NASA’s studies have found that when the surface movement slows down, sunspot counts drop significantly. All records of sunspot counts and other proxies of solar activity going back 6,000 years clearly validates our own findings that when we have sunspot counts lower then 50 it means only one thing - an intense cold climate, globally. NASA says the solar cycle 25, the one after the next that starts this spring will be at 50 or lower. The general opinion of the SSRC scientists is that it could begin even sooner within 3 years with the next solar cycle 24. What we are saying today is that my own research and that of the other scientists at the SSRC verifies that NASA is right about one thing – a solar cycle of 50 or lower is headed our way. With this next solar minimum predicted by NASA, what I call a “solar hibernation,” the SSRC forecasts a much colder Earth just as it has transpired before for thousands of years. If NASA is the more accurate on the schedule, then we may see even warmer temperatures before the bottom falls out. If the SSRC and other scientists around the world are correct then we have only a few years to prepare before 20-30 years of lasting and possibly dangerous cold arrive.”

When asked about what this will mean to the average person on the street, Casey was firm. “The last time this particular cycle regenerated was over 200 years ago. I call it the “Bi-Centennial Cycle” solar cycle. It took place between 1793 and 1830, the so-called Dalton Minimum, a period of extreme cold that resulted in what historian John D. Post called the ‘last great subsistence crisis.’ With that cold came massive crops losses, food riots, famine and disease. I believe this next climate change will be much stronger and has the potential to once more cause widespread crop losses globally with the resultant ill effects. The key difference for this next Bi-Centennial Cycle’s impact versus the last is that we will have over 8 billion mouths to feed in the next coldest years where as we had only 1 billion the last time. Among other effects like social and economic disruption, we are facing the real prospect of the ‘perfect storm of global food shortages’ in the next climate change. In answer to the question, everyone on the street will be affected.”

Given the importance of the next climate change Casey was asked whether the government has been notified. “Yes, as soon as my research revealed these solar cycles and the prediction of the coming cold era with the next climate change, I notified all the key offices in the Bush administration including both parties in the Senate and House science committees as well as most of the nation’s media outlets. Unfortunately, because of the intensity of coverage of the UN IPCC and man made global warming during 2007, the full story about climate change is very slow in getting told. These changes in the sun have begun. They are unstoppable. With the word finally starting to get out about the next climate change, hopefully we will have time to prepare.

Right now, the newly organized SSRC is the leading independent research center in the US and possibly worldwide, that is focused on the next climate change. Some of the world’s brightest scientists, also experts in solar physics and the next climate change have joined with me. In the meantime we will do our best to spread the word along with NASA and others who can see what is about to take place for the Earth’s climate. Soon, I believe this will be recognized as the most important climate story of this century.”

The previous NASA announcement was made at:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10may_longrange.htm

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Scientists create machine that knows what you are thinking

Scientists have developed a machine which is capable of reading our mind and revealing our most private thoughts.

American researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, found that, with the aid of a sophisticated scanner and computer programme, they were able to determine how the brain lights up when thinking about different subjects.

Using an advanced form of MRI scanner, they analysed how the brain reacted to ten drawings of tools and buildings.

They then used a computer programme to work out whether a person was thinking about a tool or a building.

The researchers' analysis was found to be 97 per cent accurate but they went on to show that they could distinguish between two similar objects, such as two different tools, almost as successfully.

This is the first time the technique has been finetuned to distinguish between similar objects.

The brain scans also showed many different brain regions are involved in processing information even in the case of something as simple as a line drawing of a hammer.

Thinking about how a hammer is used activated the areas involved in movement, while thinking about the shape of a hammer and what it is used for lit up other regions.

Despite being limited to picking up the thoughts behind just ten pictures, the researchers are confident that they will soon be able to identify entire sentences.

One of the team, Dr Svetlana Shinkareva, said: "We hope to progress to identifying the thoughts associated not just with pictures but also with words and eventually sentences."

The technique could also have medical applications by, for example, providing valuable insights into conditions such as autism.

Study leader Professor Marcel Just said: "People with autism perceive others in a distinctive way that has been difficult to characterise.

"This approach offers a way to discover that characterisation."

The study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, also showed that different people think about the same thing in the same way.

"This part of the study establishes, as never before, that there is a commonality in how different people's brains represent the same subject," the study said.

"There has always been a philosophical conundrum as to whether one person's perception of the colour blue is the same as another person's.

"Now we see that there is a great deal of commonality across different people's brain activity corresponding to familiar tools and dwellings."

The device's possibilities can, however, be extended and the team envisage a time when it will be used to conduct infallible lie detector tests, while the accurate interpretation of a person's intentions could allow police to arrest criminals before they break the law, as seen in the film Minority Report.

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Researchers Discover the Key To Powering the Planet With Garbage

Who can forget the historical sci-fi moment when the Dr Emmet Brown of “Back to the Future” fame shoved some garbage into his time car to make it run? It was such a memorable moment in sci-fi history because it had a truthful ring to it—why can’t we power the world with garbage instead of expensive, polluting oil? We can, according to new research. In fact, a garbage-fueled society is a smart alternative. It’s like killing two birds with one stone. You can take common sources of organic waste products such as human sewage, animal waste, or agricultural runoff that isn’t being used for anything and convert it into cheap, renewable electricity.

“Performing double-duty of energy generation and pollution prevention is a huge advantage of an microbial fuel cell,” researcher Andrew Kato Marcus told The Daily Galaxy. He and his colleagues recently published a study featured in the journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering, which offers some key insights into the process. According to Marcus, in may ways “garbage power” is the ideal solution. And it’s already being done notes, “last year by a group in Harbin Institute, China actually used landfill leachate as the fuel for an MFC [microbial fuel cell].”

Bruce Rittmann, director of the Center for Environmental Biotechnology at the Biodesign Institute explained to The Daily Galaxy that the impact could be huge. "If all the residual (waste) biomass from agriculture, the food-processing industry, and a number of industries could be collected and converted to electricity, we could displace up to 25% of the world’s energy demand today. Of course, we really cannot collect and convert all of it, but we can see that biomass conversion via MFCs or some other microbial systems can have a big impact on displacing fossil fuels.”

Bacteria have such a rich diversity that researchers can find a bacterium that can handle almost any waste compound in their daily diet. By linking bacterial metabolism directly with electricity production, the MFC eliminates the extra steps necessary in other fuel cell technologies.

How does it work? An anode respiring bacterium breaks down the organic waste to carbon dioxide and transfers the electrons released to the anode. Next, the electrons travel from the anode, through an external circuit to generate electrical energy. Finally, the electrons complete the circuit by traveling to the cathode, where they are taken up by oxygen and hydrogen ions to form water.
The bacteria depend on the anode for life. The bacteria at the anode breathe the anode, much like people breathe air, by transferring electrons to the anode. Because bacteria use the anode in their metabolism, they strategically position themselves on the anode surface to form a bacterial community called a biofilm.

Bacteria in the biofilm produce a matrix of material so that they stick to the anode. The biofilm matrix is rich with material that can potentially transport electrons. The sticky biofilm matrix is made up of a complex of extracellular proteins, sugars, and bacterial cells. The matrix also has been shown to contain tiny conductive nanowires that may help facilitate electron conduction.
Bacteria have evolved to utilize almost any chemical as a food source.

"Our numerical model develops and supports the idea that the bacterial matrix is conductive," said Marcus. In electronics, conductors are most commonly made of materials like copper that make it easier for a current to flow through. "In a conductive matrix, the movement of electrons is driven by the change in the electrical potential." Like a waterfall, the resulting voltage drop in the electrical potential pushes the flow of electrons.

Within the MFC is a complex ecosystem where bacteria are living within a self-generated matrix that conducts the electrons. "The whole biofilm is acting like the anode itself, a living electrode," said Marcus. "This is why we call it the 'biofilm anode.'"

Bacteria will grow as long as there is an abundant supply of nutrients. Jacques Monod, one of the founding fathers of molecular biology, developed an equation to describe this relationship. While the team recognized the importance of the Monod equation for bacteria bathed in a rich nutrient broth, the challenge was to apply the Monod equation to the anode, a solid. The team recognized that the electrical potential is equivalent to the concentration of electrons; and the electrons are precisely what the bacteria transfer to the anode.

Equipped with this key insight, the team developed a new model, the Nernst-Monod equation, to describe the rate of bacterial metabolism in response to the "concentration of electrons" or the electrical potential.

In their model, the team identified three crucial variables to controlling an MFC: the amount of waste material (fuel), the accumulation of biomass on the anode, and the electrical potential in the biofilm anode. The third factor is a totally novel concept in MFC research.

But how practical is this technology? Could this replace conventional forms of generating electricity in most parts of the world?

“I imagine MFCs becoming a competitive, renewable energy not too far in the future,” Markus told The Daily Galaxy. “The field is gaining momentum and some of our colleagues in Australia are building pilot plants for energy generation to answer that very question. Challenges are lowering the capital cost and improving process efficiencies. For the latter, our model will be useful for making improvements.”

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Mars Exploration: Secrets of the Soil

Is there life on Mars today? This question has been fiercely debated by scientists for the past thirty years.

The evidence sent back from Mars by two Viking Landers in 1976 and 1977 was inconclusive. In fact, NASA's first press release about the Viking tests announced that the results were positive. The "labeled Release" (LR) experiments had given positive results. But after lengthy discussions in which Carl Sagan participated, NASA reversed its position, mainly because another experiment detected no organics in the soil.

Yet to this day, Gilbert Levin, the principal designer of the LR experiment, believes the tests pointed to life on Mars (7). When the same two experiments were run on soil from Antarctica, the same conflicting results were obtained (LR - positive; organics - negative.) Soil and ice from Antarctica certainly contains life. The test for organics was negative because it is far less sensitive than the LR experiment. The same problem could have caused the organics test on Mars to give a false negative.

Before oxygen could accumulate in Earth's atmosphere, all the exposed iron had to rust. During that process, lasting hundreds of millions of years, Earth was also a red planet. In the current issue of the journal Nature, Corinna Wu asks: Could the oxygen that rusted the iron on Mars have been produced biologically? Could life on Mars have simply "run out of steam" after that stage of its development?

The answers to these profound questions will hopefully be made by the Phoenix Probe's Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA) built by the University of Arizona and University of Texas, is a combination high-temperature furnace and mass spectrometer instrument that scientists will use to analyze Martian ice and soil samples. The robotic arm will deliver samples to a hopper designed to feed a small amount of soil and ice into eight tiny ovens about the size of an ink cartridge in a ballpoint pen. Each of these ovens will be used only once to analyze eight unique samples.

Once a sample is successfully received and sealed in an oven, the temperature is slowly increased at a constant rate, and the power required for heating is carefully and continuously monitored. This process, called scanning calorimetry, shows the transitions from solid to liquid to gas of the different materials in the sample: important information needed by scientists to understand the chemical character of the soil and ice.

As the temperature of the furnace increases up to 1000°C (1800°F), the ice and other volatile materials in the sample are vaporized into a stream of gases. These are called evolved gases and are transported via an inert carrier to a mass spectrometer, a device used to measure the mass and concentrations of specific molecules and atoms in a sample. The mass spectrometer is sensitive to detection levels down to 10 parts per billion, a level that may detect minute quantities of organic molecules potentially existing in the ice and soil.

With these precise measurement capabilities, scientists will be able to determine ratios of various isotopes of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen, providing clues to origin of the volatile molecules, and possibly, biological processes that occurred in the past.

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Insects, not meteor, killed dinosaurs: study

Dinosaurs were killed off by disease-ridden insects and changing plant life rather than a cataclysmic single event, a new book claims.

The US-based study claims mosquitoes, ticks and termites forced the dinosaurs into extinction between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods 65 million years ago.

According to the most widely accepted theories, animal life was killed off either by a massive meteor that hurtled into the sea near Mexico, or large volcanic eruptions in India which triggered extreme climate change.

But Oregon State University's George and Roberta Poinar say that does not explain why the dinosaurs died off over a long period — which would be unlikely in both cases.

"By themselves, such events do not explain a process that in reality took a very, very long time, perhaps millions of years," George Poinar said in a statement.

"Insects and diseases do provide that explanation."

He argues that fatal diseases including leishmaniasis and malaria, which have been extracted by scientists from the bodies of ancient insects, could hold the clue to the extinction of dinosaurs.

These diseases could have found their way into the bloodstream of the prehistoric mammals through a simple bite.

Hungry insect intruders would also have competed for food with herbivorous dinosaurs.

As the herbivorous animals began to die out, their predators in turn would have no way of surviving.

These factors "could all have provided a lingering, debilitating condition that dinosaurs were ultimately unable to overcome", the authors wrote.

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