Editor's Choice: Five Important U.S. Energy Stories Of 2012. By Stephen Lacey "Editor’s Choice: Five Important U.S. Energy Stories Of 2012" The presidential and congressional elections dominated the American news cycle in 2012. And although climate change took a backseat during the campaign, energy played a surprisingly prominent role. The news cycle was dominated by energy: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made fossil fuel extraction his number one priority; fossil fuel interests spent hundreds of millions of dollars to promote oil, coal, and gas during the election; and President Obama busily defended his promotion of renewable energy after getting attacked by the fossil fuel lobby. Looking back at 2012, here are some of the most important energy stories of the year: AP Fact Check: In 36 Years Of Data, No Evidence That Drilling Reduces Gasoline Prices In March, the Associated Press analyzed more than 30 years of gas price and domestic drilling data.
This was a particularly important story in 2012. But the lavish spending didn’t work. Error-Riddled Matt Ridley Piece Lowballs Climate Change, Discredits Wall Street Journal. World Faces 10°F Warming. By Joe Romm "Error-Riddled Matt Ridley Piece Lowballs Climate Change, Discredits Wall Street Journal. World Faces 10°F Warming. " Leading Scientists Debunk Ridley Piece, Even Climatologist Cited By Ridley Says He “Is Just Plain Wrong About Future Warming” Memo to media, deniers: “Climate sensitivity” is NOT the same as projected future warming! Projected warming even with (an unlikely) low climate sensitivity of between 1.5°C and 2.0°C from Michael Schlesinger et al 2012. A WSJ op-ed that cites this work absurdly concludes “Evidence points to a further rise of just 1°C by 2100.” Every major projection of future warming makes clear that if we keep listening to the falsehoods of the anti-science crowd and keep taking no serious action to reduce carbon pollution we face catastrophic 9°F to 11°F [5°C to 6°C] warming over most of the U.S.
Ridley and the Journal apparently don’t know the difference between water vapor and clouds. An unnamed physicist? And this guy is a taken seriously by anyone? Why Some Civil War Soldiers Glowed in the Dark. By the spring of 1862, a year into the American Civil War, Major General Ulysses S. Grant had pushed deep into Confederate territory along the Tennessee River. In early April, he was camped at Pittsburg Landing, near Shiloh, Tennessee, waiting for Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s army to meet up with him. On the morning of April 6, Confederate troops based out of nearby Corinth, Mississippi, launched a surprise offensive against Grant’s troops, hoping to defeat them before the second army arrived.
Grant’s men, augmented by the first arrivals from the Ohio, managed to hold some ground, though, and establish a battle line anchored with artillery. The Union troops began forcing the Confederates back, and while a counterattack stopped their advance it did not break their line. All told, the fighting at the Battle of Shiloh left more than 16,000 soldiers wounded and more 3,000 dead, and neither federal or Confederate medics were prepared for the carnage. A Bright Spot A Good Light. Technology - Garance Franke-Ruta - Still Confused About the Higgs Boson? Read This. A chance encounter at a July 4 picnic made the latest development in particle physics seem much more comprehensible. Here's what I learned. So I was at a July 4 picnic on Wednesday where one of the other guests used to be a physics teacher at Stuyvesant High School, and he explained this whole Higgs boson thing to me in a way that made it make about as much sense as it's going to for someone who only took physics in college.
And he did the whole thing without using food metaphors -- molasses, soup, etc. -- which I thought was impressive. Basically, it's like this: Sub-atomic particles are either fermions or bosons. Bosons are different. But if this whole particle-that-lacks-mass thing is still tripping you up, you don't need to use that word in your own head; bosons lose nothing for our purposes by being thought of as entities, even if they are still technically particles, which is to say something really small of which other things are made. . * Gluons. . * W and Z bosons. . * Photons. 10 Mind-Blowing Discoveries This Week | Environment. Photo Credit: Everett Collection/ Shutterstock.com July 5, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. It was champagne and top hats all around in the science world this week. That’s a twofer! 1. Good news, jokers, smokers and midnight tokers!
Natalie Wolchover of Life’s Little Mysteries quotes Dr. Instead, it might still have been a synthetic version of bath salts that went undetected. Meanwhile, a man high on a synthetic version of pot zombie-attacked and violently killed the family dog after trying to eat it . Jesus. 2. “Drug-addled, flesh-eating zombies are so last month,” you say with a yawn. That might happen more often than you think. Researchers at the Universidad de Porto in Portugal have found that humans don’t just catch yawns from each other -- dogs catch them from their owners. The human-dog connection is so strong that this will feel intuitive to any dog lover. 3.
10 Most Magnificent Trees in the World. "A tree is a wonderful living organism which gives shelter, food, warmth and protection to all living things. It even gives shade to those who wield an axe to cut it down" - Buddha. There are probably hundreds of majestic and magnificent trees in the world - of these, some are particularly special: 10.
Lone Cypress in Monterey (Image credit: bdinphoenix [flickr]) (Image credit: mikemac29 [flickr]) Buffeted by the cold Pacific Ocean wind, the scraggly Lone Cypress [wiki] (Cupressus macrocarpa) in Pebble Beach, Monterey Peninsula, California, isn't a particularly large tree. 9. As a hobby, bean farmer Axel Erlandson [wiki] shaped trees - he pruned, bent, and grafted trees into fantastic shapes and called them "Circus Trees. " Basket Tree (Image credit: jpeepz [flickr]) The two-legged tree (Image credit: Vladi22, Wikipedia) Ladder tree (Image credit: Arborsmith) Axel Erlandson underneath one of his arborsculpture (Image credit: Wilma Erlandson, Cabinet Magazine) 8. 7. Chandelier Tree. 6. 5. 4. 3. When Left Is “Right” Motor Fluency Shapes Abstract Concepts + Author Affiliations Daniel Casasanto, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, P.O.
Box 310, 6500 AH, Nijmegen, The Netherlands E-mail: casasanto@alum.mit.edu Abstract Right- and left-handers implicitly associate positive ideas like “goodness” and “honesty” more strongly with their dominant side of space, the side on which they can act more fluently, and negative ideas more strongly with their nondominant side. Here we show that right-handers’ tendency to associate “good” with “right” and “bad” with “left” can be reversed as a result of both long- and short-term changes in motor fluency. Article Notes The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article. Honeybees May Have Personality | Wired Science.
By Olivia Solon, Wired UK Bees have different “personalities”, with some showing a stronger willingness or desire to seek adventure than others, according to a study by entomologists at the University of Illinois. [partner id="wireduk"]The researchers found that thrill-seeking is not limited to humans and other vertebrates. The brains of honeybees that were more likely than others to seek adventure exhibited distinct patterns of gene activity in molecular pathways known to be associated with thrill-seeking in humans. The findings present a new perspective on honeybee communities, which were thought to be highly regimented and comprised of a colony of interchangeable workers taking on a few specific roles to serve their queen.
It now seems as though individual honeybees differ in their desire to perform particular tasks and these differences could be down to variability in bees’ personalities. Have you seen a grumpy honeybee or an irritable ant? Image: Gilles San Martin/Flickr. Big NZ fossil penguin reconstructed. 28 February 2012Last updated at 01:44 The ancient penguins are shown in this artist's impression A large extinct penguin has been reconstructed from fossil remains discovered in New Zealand.
Researchers used bones from two separate examples of the ancient birds, using the skeleton of a modern king penguin as a guide. They show the 25 million-year-old Kairuku penguin was tall at 1.2m (4ft 2in), with an elongated beak and large flippers. The team's work appears in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. The reconstruction shows that the Kairuku penguin was easily the largest of the five species that were common to New Zealand during the Oligocene time period.
The efforts were partly inspired by the bird's unusual body shape, which is different from any other known penguin, living or extinct. "Kairuku was an elegant bird by penguin standards, with a slender body and long flippers, but short, thick legs and feet," said co-author Dr Dan Ksepka, from North Carolina State University, US.
Hydra Watch What They Eat. A picture of a hydra, from the Encyclopedia of Life Upon first glance, hydra seem like remarkably simple creatures. The basic description of a hydra would be a tube closed at one end with tentacles surrounding a mouth on the other, made of fragile tissue that can be as slim as two cells thick. No gills, no heart, no brain, no eyes – of course, it would be hard to pack all those organs into a creature a few millimeters long, and hydra certainly seem to do well enough without them. These small relatives of jellyfish are found worldwide, and are some of the only members of the phylum Cnidaria to be found in fresh water. Yet their modest body plan is misleading.
Hydra have fascinated scientists for centuries, for they have a phenomenal capacity to regenerate and may even be immortal. The hydra’s simple nature is also belied by their tentacles, which inject a potent neurotoxin into unsuspecting prey using extremely sophisticated cells called cnidocytes. Animal Minds. Photograph by Vincent J. Musi In 1977 Irene Pepperberg, a recent graduate of Harvard University, did something very bold. At a time when animals still were considered automatons, she set out to find what was on another creature’s mind by talking to it. She brought a one-year-old African gray parrot she named Alex into her lab to teach him to reproduce the sounds of the English language.
“I thought if he learned to communicate, I could ask him questions about how he sees the world.” When Pepperberg began her dialogue with Alex, who died last September at the age of 31, many scientists believed animals were incapable of any thought. “That’s why I started my studies with Alex,” Pepperberg said. Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others’ motives, imitating others, and being creative. Pepperberg bought Alex in a Chicago pet store. “Want grape,” Alex said. “Ssse... won! “What’s same?” Darkness on the Edge of the Universe. Sounds delicious! New study shows link between pitch and flavor. By Brian Alexander, NBC News Contributor Do you think pinot grigio “smells” like a note from a clarinet?
Does the sound of a bass “taste” like a dark red Barolo? If so, you are using “crossmodal” associations, drawing on analogies from various senses in order to create a picture of the world. And you’re not odd. A new study from Oxford University scientists shows that taste and sound are intimately linked. An extreme form of this phenomenon is synesthesia, a condition in which one might see the number 8 as red, for example. Hear something in that wine? Imagine yourself on one side of a small hill when suddenly you hear a very loud, deep-toned thump coming from the other side. This ability is a survival tool, Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new study said. Until now, a crossmodal link between taste and pitch hadn’t been scientifically validated. Blindfolded or not, significant associations emerged. Dissolve My Nobel Prize! Fast! (A True Story) Benjamin Arthur for NPR It's 1940. The Nazis have taken Copenhagen.
They are literally marching through the streets, and physicist Niels Bohr has just hours, maybe minutes, to make two Nobel Prize medals disappear. These medals are made of 23-karat gold. They are heavy to handle, and being shiny and inscribed, they are noticeable. The Nazis have declared no gold shall leave Germany, but two Nobel laureates, one of Jewish descent, the other an opponent of the National Socialists, have quietly sent their medals to Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics, for protection.
Their act is probably a capital offense — if the Gestapo can find the evidence. Hulton Archive/Getty Images, Hulton Archive/Getty Images, AP Inconveniently, that evidence was now sitting in Bohr's building, clearly inscribed "Von Laue" (for Max von Laue, winner of the 1914 Prize for Physics) and "Franck" (for James Franck, the physics winner in 1925) — like two death warrants. How To Get Rid of A Nobel Prize Medal.