CO2 RISING--THE SOUNDTRACK

We're currently pumping 2.4 million pounds of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere per second!

Earth's atmosphere is pretty big, but human activity is measurably changing it.

The longest run of measurements of atmospheric CO2 was started by American scientist Charles Keeling in 1958, from an observatory atop Hawaii's Mauna Loa.

The Keeling Curve--Atmospheric CO2 1958-2015

Credit: By Delorme - Own work. Data from Dr. Pieter Tans, NOAA/ESRL and Dr. Ralph Keeling, Scripps Institution of Oceanography., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40636957

Keeling was the first to document irrefutably that atmospheric CO2 was rising, we now know due to the burning of fossil fuels and other human enterprises such as agriculture and deforestation.

That record of the concentration of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere is known as the Keeling Curve. It shows clear yearly cycles as vegetation absorbs and releases CO2 with the changing seasons.

But it also shows the dramatic rise in CO2 levels from 315 parts per million (ppm) in 1958 to today's levels of more than 400 ppm.

Two University of Washington atmospheric scientists, doctoral student Judy Twedt and Prof. Dargan Frierson, decided to dramatize what we're doing to the atmosphere by transforming the Keeling Curve into music.

You can hear and see the resulting YouTube video here. It speaks for itself.

To view a striking visualization of rising CO2 levels, check out item 3 at this URL.

TEN PERCENT OF US HAVE HIGH CONCENTRATIONS OF TEN OR MORE TOXINS IN OUR BLOOD

It's common knowledge that we're all exposed to many different kinds of toxins from the air we breathe, the water we drink, the pesticides and other chemicals we're exposed to and many other sources, and that some of those accumulate and persist in our bodies.

Cycling of POPs. Credit: EUGRIS

What we didn't know but researchers have just discovered, is that at least some of those pollutants are not spread randomly through the population, with some individuals having more of one and others having more of a different one. Much like income or wealth, some people have just a little while some have a lot.

A new study of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs)--the first that looked at many different kinds of POPs in the same people at the same time--found that that they were strongly clustered, with more than 10% of the U.S. population carrying ten or more different POPs in their blood at concentrations above the 90th percentile. Blacks, people with low incomes, people with a high body mass index (BMI) and older individuals were more likely to carry heavy loads of multiple organic toxins.

Industrial smokestacks--one source of pollutants

Credit Peter Essick/National Geographic

When I asked physician and epidemiologist Miquel Porta, one of the study's authors, about the implications of his findings, he first cautioned about stirring up fear. "As a physician, I firmly believe that fear is seldom compatible with a broad vision of health," he wrote. 

However, he went on to emphasize that finding that a large number of people have 90th-percentile-or-higher concentrations of 10 or more known toxins needs to be noted by researchers and public health authorities:

"Whatever we know, whatever we think we know about the adverse health effects of a given chemical compound, and about the adverse health effects of several different compounds, simply think that it will not be uncommon for them to be--each and all--present at high concentrations in a significant minority of your patients, constituency, citizens, family or friends. And then think about the plausible negative health effects of the combination or 'cocktail' at high and low concentrations."

As reported in the journal PLOS One, Porta and his colleagues looked at the concentrations of 91 POPs in the blood of 4739 people living in the U.S. They found that 13% of the people studied had 10 or more of the most frequently detected organic pollutants at or above 90th percentile levels. You can view the original article here.

"Decades after the evidence on the presence of toxic chemical mixtures in humans became available, official approaches to assess the risks for human health of such mixtures continue to lag tragically behind scientific evidence of the adverse effects of individual compounds and the potential effects of mixtures," Porta writes.

"We provide a method to improve exposure assessment. Our method is an important complement to what is usually done."

In other words, it's no longer justifiable to study one toxin at a time in one group of people at a time. Now that we know that many different toxins pile up in certain populations, with the odds tilted by race, age, income and other factors, studies, recommendations and regulations that don't take that into account from the start are likely to seriously underestimate the risks to the health of a significant number of people.

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You can find a follow-up to this research, detailing some of the health impacts of POPs, here.
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GALAXIES LIKE GRAINS OF SAND

The universe just got ten times more crowded.

Less than a century ago, astronomers believed that the Milky Way galaxy--our home galaxy--comprised the entire universe. In 1924, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered galaxies, "island universes" far beyond the Milky Way. As telescopes got bigger and better, and eventually were sent into space, researchers estimated that the observable universe--the part of the universe from which light has had time to reach Earth--contained some 120 billion galaxies.

Hubble Ultra-deep field, 2014. Credit: NASA

Today, a team of researchers from NASA and ESA (the European Space Agency) released the results from a new and more accurate 3-D galactic census. The find that for every galaxy astronomers can see with today's telescopes, there are at least 10 that will be detected by the next generations of instruments.

"It boggles the mind that over 90% of the galaxies in the universe have yet to be studied," says the study's lead author, Christopher Conselice.

So it looks as though we live in a universe not with 120 billion other galaxies, but 1.2 trillion. With an average galaxy containing, say, 100 billion stars, that makes the star count around 10 to the 23rd power, or 10 with 23 zeroes after it.

It seems like pretty much every astronomical discovery, starting with Copernicus' shocking revelation in 1543 that Earth is not the center of the cosmos, has had the effect of pointing out that we're not quite as significant in the big scheme of things as we might like to think. 

The good news is that knowing that we're just the inhabitants of the third planet around one star out of a hundred billion in one galaxy out of a trillion does put our current worries--right down to the size of a particular presidential candidate's hands--into perspective.

(And hats off to British science fiction author, Brian Aldiss, for the evocative and prophetic title of his 1960 book, Galaxies Like Grains of Sand.)

Roy Cohn would be proud of Donald Trump

After viewing the second presidential debate, historian Lev Adler posted this commentary on the Daily Kos. He paints Trump as Roy Cohn's prize pupil, a master of the dark arts of demagoguery that Cohn honed as Joseph McCarthy's hit man during the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) witch hunts of the 1950s.

Donald Trump at a 2016 rally. Credit Wikipedia

DO THE MATH--THE CLIMATE CAN'T TAKE ANY NEW DRILLING OR DIGGING

In the Paris Agreement reached last year, the international community, represented by 195 nations including the U.S., agreed that it's vital to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Centigrade (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial levels. 

Dignitaries celebrating the Paris Agreement, 12/12/15--Credit U.S. Dept. of State

As reported by environmentalist Bill McKibben, writing in the New Republic, the latest calculations show that if we burn the fossil fuels in the mines and wells that already exist, Earth's surface temperature rise will exceed that 2 degree limit.

Open-pit coal mine in Dhanbad, India--Credit Wikipedia

According to these new calculations, adding 800 gigatons (800 billion tons) of CO2 into the atmosphere will push the climate through the 2 degree C. limit. There are 942 gigatons waiting to be extracted from existing mines and wells to be burned. Do the math.

The sobering conclusion is that we can't afford to drill any new oil wells, dig any new coal mines, or open up any more territory for fracking.  If we're serious about controlling global warming, McKibben writes, "we're done expanding the fossil fuel frontier."

The problem is that fossil fuel companies have no intention of abandoning the reserves and leases that are crucial to their future profits--their potential "stranded assets." According to Carbon Tracker, that could amount to some $2 trillion. Two trillion dollars represents a lot of motivation to keep drilling and digging no matter what the environmental and societal costs, and makes investing a few hundred million to influence elections, lawmakers and regulators seem like a pittance.

Still, if we're in the biggest hole ever, as McKibben says, the simple answer is, "stop digging." 

POLICE BODYCAMS DRASTICALLY REDUCE CITIZEN COMPLAINTS

New research involving six police departments in the U.S. and the U.K. tracking nearly 1.5 million officer-hours found a striking 93% reduction in public complaints against police officers. 

The researchers conclude that the consistent use of body-mounted cameras has a dramatic positive impact on people's behavior and on police officers' compliance with correct procedures. In effect, bodycams make cooler heads prevail.

Police officer with body-mounted camera--Credit Ryan Johnson

"Cooling down potentially volatile police-public interactions to the point where official grievances against the police virtually vanished may well lead to the conclusion that the use of body-worn cameras represents a turning point in policing," says Barak Ariel, a criminologist at Cambridge University, in the U.K., and lead author of the study, which appears in the journal Criminal Justice and Behaviour.

With the current challenge to police credibility due to a seemingly endless stream of officer-involved shootings, the resistance of some police officers to the use of bodycams, and many states restricting access to videos from police encounters, this research--one of the largest randomized and controlled experiments in the history of criminology--deserves to be taken seriously by police departments across the U.S. Video footage may show some officers acting badly, but overall it appears to protect the police and the public.

I FINLLY GET IT! TRUMP AND HIS SUPPORTERS ARE "ROLLIN' COAL" IN OUR FACES AND LOVING IT.

You've may have heard about dudes "rollin' coal"--modifying their diesel trucks to belch clouds of oily smoke.

Credit: Wikipedia

Sometimes they blast out the soot on the open road, but at times the blasts target bicyclists, pedestrians, and--a favorite--those environmentalist Prius drivers. 

You can see rollin' coal in action here. 

It's not cheap. According to Wikepedia, it can cost up to $5000 to make the changes.

What's the payoff? I'm guessing it's basically the pleasure of saying "fuck you" to the world, written in black smoke. The bigger and blacker the cloud, the stronger the statement.

Finding out about rollin' coal helped me to wrap my head around Trump's core supporters, and especially why it is that the worse Trump acts the more popular he gets. (See my post, "Most Trump Supporters Extremely Enthusiastic," Sept. 16, 2016, or at the Daily KOS).

Like the good old boys rollin' coal, Trump gives his followers a thrill and an ego boost every time he insults women, threatens to ban Muslims, deport Mexicans, stop and frisk African Americans, or floats a mind-bending new lie. The more outrageous the statement, the more exciting it is, especially when it elicits outraged howls from such despised others as liberals, progressives, and the press.

You can read a similar take on the smug satisfaction Trump and his Alt-Right supporters get from saying (and soon doing) outrageous things in a piece by Jeremy Sherman at this URL. 

As the pollsters and pundits have been saying for months, there are a lot of aggrieved and angry people out there. I respect their intelligence enough to find it hard to believe that many of them really think that Trump can or will live up to his grandiose promises--re-open the coal mines, bring back all those blue-collar jobs, make America great again, whatever that means, and actually make their lives better in any tangible way. With the exception, of course, of his billionaire backers, who will make billions more through deregulation of financial markets.

But the aggrieved and angry can see that Trump is making the lives of the rest of us worse every time he opens his mouth. What a rush that must be. 

Credit: Mike Licht/NotionsCapital.com

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10/4/18--Trump exhibited an especially ugly version of this in his mocking of sexual assault victim Dr. Christine Blasey Ford at a rally in Mississippi. As Atlantic author Adam Serwer summarized, "the cruelty is the point."

Link to Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight site

We've all heard of statistician and author Nate Silver's acumen in predicting the outcome of political races, not to mention baseball, football, Oscars, etc. 

Here's a link to the presidential page of his website, FiveThirtyEight, where you'll find great stats and probably the best available prognostics about Clinton vs. Trump, the state-by-state races, the Electoral College, etc.

FiveThirtyEight

As of today, 9/20/16, Silver is estimating Clinton's odds of winning at 56.2% vs 43.8% for Trump.

If you want to know what goes into his predictions, you can get all the details here.

STEPHEN COLBERT DISSECTS TRUMP'S BIRTHER LIES

In case you missed Stephen Colbert on The Late Show last night, he brilliantly took apart Trump's about-face on where Obama was born and his head-spinning claim that Hillary started the birther slur.

You can view the YouTube video here.

OF MICE, MEN AND DEPRESSION

Why do antidepressants not always work?

As many people suffering from depression know all too well, even the best available antidepressant medications often don't work. A new study sheds some light on this problem.

Vincent Van Gogh/1890/Wikipedia

Silvia Poggini and her colleagues studied the effects of selective seretoninin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) in mice.  Writing in the 27 July edition of Brain, Behavior and Immunity, they report that the SSRIs don't directly reduce depression, but instead seem to make the brain more responsive to the environment and more open to change.

“This work indicates that simply taking an SSRI is probably not enough. To use an analogy, the SSRIs put you in the boat, but a rough sea can determine whether you will enjoy the trip. For an SSRI to work well, you may need to be in a favorable environment, "says Poggini.

It's always a stretch to generalize from animal research to people, but this certainly suggests that people suffering from depression can't rely only on antidepressant medication, but need to work on their life circumstances as well.

Robert Reich on Trump vs. Hillary

If you're a progressive or undecided voter who finds it hard to like or trust either candidate, take a minute to read this piece by Robert Reich. 

Credit: Wikipedia

He takes on the "lesser of two evils" argument and explains very clearly why this is not the time for a protest vote or not to vote at all.

WELCOME TO 1984, BIG BROTHER AND THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH

"WAR IS PEACE."

"FREEDOM IS SLAVERY."

"IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."

--GEORGE ORWELL, Nineteen Eight-Four

"HILLARY CLINTON . . . STARTED THE BIRTHER CONTROVERSY."

--DONALD TRUMP, 2016

Credit: Stephen Bettany

Doublethink at its best. The Ministry of Truth will be very busy rewriting the history of the last five years.

For a quick review of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, click here.

MOST TRUMP SUPPORTERS EXTREMELY ENTHUSIASTIC--OMG!

Polls show Clinton-Trump "enthusiasm gap."

According to the latest PDP tracking polls of likely voters, most supporters of Trump are highly enthusiastic about their candidate; far more than are excited about Hillary Clinton. 

PDP writes:

However, turnout in a close election will likely decide the winner of the race and, even though Mrs. Clinton definitely has the larger GOTV [get out the vote] operation, her supporters are markedly less enthusiastic than Trump voters. A whopping two-thirds (66%) say they are “Extremely Enthusiastic” about voting for Mr. Trump in November, while less than half (45%) say the same about voting for Mrs. Clinton. Another roughly one-fifth (22%) of Trump voters say they are “Very Enthusiastic” juxtaposed to 28% for Mrs. Clinton.

That makes 88% of Trump supporters either highly or extremely enthusiastic about him--so very likely to vote--vs. 73% for Clinton. We can expect to hear Trump bragging about that the next time he's in front of a TV camera.

But, more importantly, as PDP points out, " . . . turnout in a close election will likely decide the winner of the race . . . "

White nationalists are among Trump's enthusiastic supporters
Credit: Reuters;Chris Keane

Almost a century ago, in the aftermath of World War I, Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote in The Second Coming . . .

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Credit: Wonkette

Those of us who think that a a Trump presidency would be catastrophic in terms of human rights, the economy, the environment, jobs and climate--not to mention what having an angry, thin-skinned narcissist's finger on the nuclear trigger might mean--had best look to our own convictions and find our passion. As Hillary has pointed out, this isn't a reality show. In this election, it's our one and only reality that's at risk.

Note (January 5, 2017): It looks as though this post was right on target. Today, Nate Silver's 538 published an analysis entitled "Registered voters who stayed home probably cost Clinton the election." 

It's no fun having been right in predicting a tragedy.

The "Big Splash" that formed the Moon was ten times bigger than we thought

Astronomers think that the Moon was formed when a Mars-sized planet smashed into the still-growing Earth some 4.5 billion years ago--a titanic collision often called the "Big Splash."

New high-precision comparisons of the ratio of potassium isotopes in rocks from the Earth and Moon make that collision even more catastrophic than previously thought—releasing so much energy that all of the impactor and most of Earth's mantle were splashed into orbit, forming a hot, dense rapidly-rotating disc from which the Moon quickly condensed.

Artist's conception of Moon-forming impact

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

“Our results provide the first hard evidence that the impact really did—largely--vaporize Earth,” says Kun Wang, a geoscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He and Harvard University researcher Stein Jacobsen detailed their findings in a Nature article published today.

Wang and Jacobsen developed analytic techniques that let them measure minute differences between Earth and Moon rocks for the first time. It turns out that Moon rocks have significantly more heavy isotopes of potassium than Earth rocks, which is best explained by partial condensation from a superheated disc with a high internal pressure. That, in turn, requires a collision ten times more powerful than previously estimated.

Old and new collision models: In the lower-energy collision (top), the Moon has no more heavy potassium than Earth. In the higher-energy collision (bottom), the Moon has more heavy potassium than Earth, as the new study found. Credit: Kun Wang

What was earlier hypothesized to be a Mars-sized object--named Theia after the mythological mother of Selena, the Moon--crashing into the proto-Earth might have been hurtling through space much more rapidly than thought, or it might have been much more massive, perhaps as large as Earth. “It does not have to be Mars-sized anymore,” says Wang.

Many scientists think that our unusually large Moon—one quarter of Earth's diameter—has played a vital role by stabilizing and slowing Earth's rotation, making it easier for life to develop here. If they're right, we may owe our existence to a 4-billion-year-old smashup that almost vaporized Earth.

IT'S ALMOST OFFICIAL--WE'RE LIVING IN A NEW GEOLOGIC EPOCH DOMINATED BY HUMAN ACTIVITY--THE ANTHROPOCENE

Geologists are not the most radical or wild-eyed of scientists. In keeping with the rocks and strata they study, they tend to think in terms of millions or billions of years, and changes that occur, let us say, glacially.

So when the International Union of Geological Sciences announces that it's in the process of formalizing the demise of the Holocene Epoch, the climatic and geological cradle in which civilization has been developing for the past 11,000 years or so, and usher us into the uncharted, unpredictable, human-dominated Anthropocene, we'd best take notice.

 Millions of years of sedimentary layers in the Grand Canyon

Credit: USGS

The Holocene is the climatically benign epoch in which all of human civilization has unfolded. In the year 2000, Nobel prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer floated the idea that human activities rather than natural processes were now dominating Earth's biology and geology, and proposed that this be recognized as a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. After several years of deliberations, The Working Group on the 'Anthropocene' says it's time to formalize that idea.

Plastic Earth/Credit Univ. of Leicester

The Working Group will present its findings and recommendations to the 35th International Geological Congress, currently meeting in Cape Town, South Africa. That will lead to a formal proposal to the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, and, if approved, on to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, with final ratification in the hands of the Executive Committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences. 

The process, including further research to settle on one or more "golden spikes"--locations where the stratigraphic signature of human impacts is clearest--could take several years.

Clearly, it's no small thing to end one geological epoch and start another. "The Time Scale is the backbone of our science," says paleobiologist Jan Zalasiewicz, a member of the Working Group. "We do not treat it lightly at all." However, the Working Group has amassed convincing evidence that the Anthropocene is real. 

They note that since the middle of the 20th Century, the Earth System has seen markedly accelerated erosion and sedimentation, major perturbations to the cycles of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous and other elements, significant changes to climate and sea level, unprecedented changes in the distribution of plants and animals, and a marked reduction in biodiversity, all caused by human activities.

From the purely geological point of view, these changes have left clear and permanent signals in recent strata, including the presence of plastic, aluminum, concrete, fly ash and radioactive fallout.

Hydrogen bomb blast over Bikini Atoll, March 1, 1954, one of many

 nuclear blasts whose fallout contributes to the Anthropocene signal

Credit: Wikipedia

Of the 35 members of the Working Group, 34 agreed that the Anthropocene is stratigraphically real, and 30 concurred that it should formally be made a new Epoch within the Geological Time Scale.

Of course this formal recognition that we are living in an epoch dominated more by humans than by nature goes far beyond the discipline of geology. This recognition that our combined activities are impacting not just the atmosphere and climate, but the very rocks beneath our feet, tells us in no uncertain terms that the time for climate-change denial is long past and the time for concerted action overdue.

"The Earth System has, in a a real sense, begun a new trajectory," says Zalasiewicz. "The Anthropocene - beyond its formal expression in geology - seems to be useful to people as a means of grasping the scale in time and space of what is going on, and of linking myriad human activities with with the wide range of impacts on the natural world. Hopefully it may help us understand, control and adapt to those impacts."

You can read about a visionary call for concerted action to create a sustainable world here.

You can view a detailed presentation on the Anthropocene by Prof. Zalasiewicz at this URL.

You can read here an update from 1/15/18 about how scientists worldwide are homing in on an official "golden spike" that will mark the onset of the anthropocene, probably between 1952 and 1955. This comment is worth noting:


Professor Mark Williams [a geologist at the University of Leicester] said: “The range of environments we are working with is remarkable – from polar ice and snow layers to deep lake and sea floors to the skeletons of reef corals and stalactites in caves. The fact that signals of the Anthropocene are so sharply visible in all of these shows just how pervasive human impact has been on the planet in post-war times.”

EARTHLIKE PLANET DISCOVERED AROUND THE SUN'S CLOSEST NEIGHBOR

Astronomers have discovered an earthlike planet orbiting Proxima Centauri--the star closest to our sun. "It's the closest extra-terrestrial planet that will ever be found--there are no stars closer to Earth," says Guillem Anglada-Escude, at Queen Mary University of London, and one of the authors of the Nature article detailing the discovery.

Finding that our closest celestial neighbor harbors a small, rocky planet similar to Earth in the star's temperate zone suggests that potentially habitable earthlike planets are far from rare. Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf, smaller, cooler and less massive than the sun. M dwarfs like Proxima Centauri are the most abundant stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Since M dwarfs live much longer than stars like our sun, life could have ample time to develop on their planets. "If only a small fraction of M dwarfs have temperate-zone planets, our Galaxy could be teeming with life," writes Artie Hatzes, an astronomer at the Thuringian State Obsevatory, in Germany.

Artist's impression of newly discovered exoplanet Proxima b, with Proxima Centauri and its companions, double star Proxima AB just above the horizon.
Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

The newly discovered planet circles Proxima Centauri well within the star's habitable zone--the so-called Goldilocks region that's neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet's surface. The researchers calculate that Proxima b receives less heat from its star than Earth gets from the sun, but add that an atmosphere, if it has one, could boost its surface temperature enough to keep water from freezing or boiling away, just as Earth's atmosphere does for us.

Graphic showing that Proxima b orbits very close to its star, and within the star's habitable zone. Mercury's orbit around our sun is shown for comparison.
Credit: ESO/M.Kornmesser/G. Coleman

Although potentially habitable, Proxima B is by no means Earth's twin. It's at least 1.3 times as massive as Earth, its "year" is only 11.2 days long, and, like Mercury in our solar system, it's almost certainly tidally locked, with one side always facing its star. It's also blasted by far more high-energy particles and radiation than Earth, perhaps 100 times as much. Despite these differences, the researchers think a protective atmosphere could remain. "None of this excludes the existence of an atmosphere or of water," says Ansgar Reiners, an astrophysicist at the University of Gottingen.

Although astronomers saw the first hints of a planet around Proxima Centauri more than a decade ago, it took months of detailed observations by an international team using the state-of-the-art ESO telescopes in Chile earlier this year to confirm its existence beyond doubt. "When we combined the old and new data, the significance went sky high," says Anglada-Escude.

Researchers would love to learn more about Proxima b, starting with whether it does have an atmosphere and if so, what it's composed of. Another key question is whether the planet has a magnetic field like Earth's, strong enough to protect the atmosphere (and any life the planet might harbor) from stellar flares.

Although the planet is "just" 4.2 light-years away, it would take thousands of years to send a spacecraft to study it, using current technology. (Russian billionare Yuri Milner hopes to change that by using powerful laser blasts from Earth to boost smartphone-sized spacecraft to 20 percent of the speed of light. If his project, called Breakthrough Starshot, succeeds, it could speed a probe to Proxima Centauri in just 20 years).

Still, the star is close enough that the next generation of space telescopes could detect and analyze light from Proxima b and its atmosphere by blocking out light from the star. "We know the planet and its period," says Anglada-Escude. "So in the next months or years we can design an instrument to measure its properties. That will be a priority."

You can view an excellent video about the discovery, from Nature, at this URL.

Artist's impression of Proxima b orbiting reddish Proxima Centauri, with double star Proxima AB also visible. 

Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

Tightening the noose around the polio virus

The world moved a step closer to eradicating polio, a sometimes fatal crippling disease that killed or paralyzed half a million people per year in the middle of the 20th Century. 

Today, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, GPEI, announced that July marked two full years with no cases of polio caused by the wild polio virus. This is a major milestone in the ongoing campaign to clear Africa, and soon the whole world, of the polio virus.

Compared to hundreds of thousands of cases not long ago, so far this year there have been only 19 polio cases worldwide, limited to two war-torn countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Within a few years, we may completely eradicate polio, and free the world's children and their parents from this devastating disease forever. The only other human disease that we have been able to eradicate is smallpox, after an enormous international effort completed in 1979.

Children in Iron Lung ventilators

Rancho Los Amigos Hospital

Downey, California, 1953

This near-eradication of polio has been possible due to the existence of two effective polio vaccines, starting with the inactivated polio virus vaccine developed by Jonas Salk in 1952, administered by injections, and followed by a weakened virus vaccine that could be delivered by mouth, developed by Albert Sabin and widely used starting in 1961.

Most of the global eradication program has relied on the weakened-virus oral vaccine, which is less expensive and easier to administer than the killed-virus injectable vaccine. However, in rare cases the inactivated virus can mutate back to a disease-causing form. As a result, the last stages in eradicating polio will require a switch back to injections.

Funding for the multi-billion dollar eradication program comes from a variety of national, international and private sources. Rotary International deserves special praise for spearheading this effort starting in 1985.

Experts at the Global Polio Eradication Initiative hope to overcome the final obstacles and wipe polio our completely within the next few years.

Gravitational wave astronomy leaps forward with second detection of merging black holes

--Second detection of colliding black holes

--Suggests that there are more black hole pairs than expected

--Confirms that we've entered the era of gravitational wave astronomy 

Researchers representing the LIGO and Virgo consortiums announced today that their twin gravitational wave detectors recorded a second black hole merger on December 26, 2015. The discovery was announced at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, in San Diego, California, and will be detailed in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Simulation of spacetime distortion as two black holes merge

This event differed significantly from the first detected black hole merger, which took place on September 14, 2015 (see zerospinzone, February 11, 2016, below). These two black holes were very light compared to the first pair, which weighed in at 36 and 29 times the mass of our sun. The researchers calculate that the second pair of collapsed stars weighed just 14 and 8 times the mass of the sun. 

Crucially, because they were less massive, their death spiral took far longer, providing the researchers with much more information. Instead of a "chirp" lasting just one-fifth of a second, this merger warped and roiled spacetime for a full second as the black holes whirled around each other 57 times before merging and falling silent. The radiating ripples through spacetime carried away as much energy as if the entire mass of the sun were instantly transformed into pure energy.

Spacetime seismograms recorded at LIGO's gravitational-wave detectors

It's easy to see the increase in amplitude and frequency as 

the two black holes whirled closer and closer together

You can compare how the two mergers sound here.

Detecting two black hole mergers during the short first run of the LIGO interferometers--September 12, 2015 through January 19, 2016--implies that there are more relatively low-mass black hole pairs than expected lurking in the nearby universe. The LIGO team is currently making their twin detectors even more sensitive. So when they start their second round of observations this fall, they expect to detect many more gravitational events, eventually hundreds or even thousands per year.

A team of theorists at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, is excited by the hint that there may be many black holes in this mass range. They are exploring the possibility that these are primordial black holes, formed directly from gas clouds in the early history of the universe. If there are enough of them, they may explain dark matter, whose nature remains a major mystery despite decades of efforts to pin it down.

The Virgo team hopes to have a third Earth-based gravitational wave observatory, near Pisa, Italy, up and running later this year. The three detectors working together will allow researchers to pinpoint the location in space of black hole mergers and other sources of gravitational waves such as rapidly spinning neutron stars or colliding neutron stars.

Researchers in the now burgeoning field of gravitational astronomy hope one day to be able to listen in on the gravitational relics of the Big Bang itself--the birth cry of our universe. 

ORIGINALIST SIN

Institute co-founder, Les Adler, has published an essay or OpEdNews explaining why the Republican refusal to consider any Obama nominee to the Supreme Court qualifies as "an originalist sin." You can read the article here.

 

Gravitational Waves Finally Detected

February 11, 2016

 

Supercomputer simulation of spacetime distortion from merging black holes

It took a century. In 1916, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of spacetime. Today, a worldwide consortium of researchers announced the first detection of this fundamental phenomenon, confirmed through measurements made by two exquisitely sensitive instruments in Louisiana and Washington. 

"Einstein would be beaming, wouldn't he," said Gabriela Gonzalez, spokesperson for the LIGO consortium.

This epochal discovery not only demonstrates the phenomenal power and reach of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, it also opens up a whole new way of studying the universe, something we'll be hearing much more about -- gravitational astronomy.

"We have detected gravitational waves. We did it!” said David Reitze, Executive Director of the LIGO Laboratory. "Four hundred years ago, Galileo turned a telescope to the sky and opened the era of observational astronomy.  We're opening a new window on the universe, gravitational astronomy.” 

The crucial observation took place on September 14, 2015, when the two huge detectors of LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, one in Hanford, Washington, the other in Livingston, Louisiana simultaneously recorded ripples in spacetime that increased in frequency and intensity and then subsided over the course of one-fifth of a second. Those waves precisely matched what Einstein's equations of general relativity predict for the final moments of the death spiral and merger of two black holes.

 First spacetime "seismogram," tracing the death spiral and merger of two black holes

You can view a simulation of two black holes merging at this URL.

“These waves were produced by two colliding black holes about 1.3 billion years ago, and detected by LIGO, the most precise measuring device ever built," said Reitze.

 The LIGO interferometer in Hanford, Washington. Each leg is 4 km (2.5 miles) long

Researchers tell us that during the last moments of the black hole merger, the amount of power roiling spacetime was greater than all the light being emitted by all the stars in the observable universe. Even though the energy released by the merger was enormous -- as much as if the mass of three suns were converted into energy in a fraction of a second -- by the time the signal reached Earth, it was incredibly faint, distorting the 4-kilometer long arms of the LIGO detector by just one thousandth the width of an atomic nucleus. It took 40 years of research and engineering to build detectors able to measure such miniscule spacetime distortions.

"Each of these black holes are about 150 km in diameter," said Reitze. "Pack thirty times the mass of the sun in that. Accelerate it to half the speed of light. Then take another like that and collide them together. That's what we saw here. It's mind boggling." 

The researchers who announced the discovery said that this was the dawn of a new era in astronomy and our understanding of the cosmos. Since gravitational waves have been roiling space since the Big Bang, Advanced LIGO and its successors may allow scientists to listen in on the earliest moments of the the birth of the cosmos. They will also open a window on the strangest and most violent events in the universe, such as the merger of two neutron stars, and help researchers to home in on the mysterious dark energy that is speeding up the expansion of the universe.

"LIGO is a fantastic beginning," said Kip Thorne, one of LIGO's co-founders. "It has opened a new window on the universe. Every time a new window has been opened up there have been surprises. Gravitational waves are so radically different [from light and other electromagnetic radiation] that we will see big surprises, perhaps even bigger than we've seen through the radio and x-ray windows."

Remarkably, the frequency of the "chirp" produced by the merging black holes lies in the range of human hearing. You can hear it yourself here. If you listen carefully, you can hear the gravitational-wave signal getting both louder and higher, exactly as predicted as two colliding black holes rock the surrounding spacetime just before merging into one.