Date Posted: 28-Jan-2012

DEATH FALL OF A COMET

A comet?s death fall into the Sun has been pictured for the first time. Over the past 15 years more than 2000 Sun-grazing comets have been detected, but up until now none had been 'followed' into the Sun's atmosphere.

Three NASA spacecrafts - Solar Dynamics Observatory, Solar Heliospheric Observatory and Solar-Terrestrial Relations Observatory ? provided a vivid picture of the comet known as C/2011 N3, as it entered and disintegrated in the Sun's lower corona.

The new data showed the comet to be part of the Kreutz comet family, which are believed to have been caused by the breakup of a larger single comet 2500 years ago.

Researchers now have new details about the composition and origins of these icy visitors, as well as a tool to study the Sun's upper atmosphere.

Date Posted: 27-Jan-2012

SOLAR STORMS

The sun has bombarded Earth with radiation from the biggest solar storm in more than six years and the strongest for radiation since May 2005.
 
The radiation in the form of protons came flying out of the sun at 93 million miles per hour.
 
For the past several years the Sun had been quiet. But this week a solar flare hit Earth with three different effects at three different times, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center in Colorado.
 
The radiation causes some disruptions to satellites sending signals back to Earth and polar-travelling aircraft were put on alert for having communication problems.
 
NASA, which used its Solar Dynamics Observatory to monitor the large solar flare erupting on the sun's northeastern hemisphere, reported that planet Earth remains safe and that there is no reason for humans to worry that solar flares will be a major problem during 2012.
 
Nor is there any rationale for concern about a sudden pole shift or the advent of extreme weather other than the heightened risk of more natural disasters, such as floods, caused by an increase in atmospheric water liquidity as a direct result of human-made hydrocarbon emissions creating a greenhouse effect.
 
NASA and the National Academy of Science this week debunked as ?sci-fi fabrication and nonsense? the data of astrophysicist Alexei Dmitriev that both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 satellites that are traveling into deep space have sent back information that the Sun and its entire solar system were moving into a volatile interstellar energy cloud.
 
Dmitriev claimed that a cloud of interstellar energy was exciting the atmospheres of the planets and the Sun.
 
Last year some scientists started speculating that the sun was going into an unusually quiet cycle that happens once a century.
 
The concern was that a more intense solar activity period would erupt after the quiet period.
 
Scientists are now watching the Sun closely from a new NASA satellite that was launched in 2010 during the sun's quiet period.
 
Radiation from last Sunday's flare continued through to Wednesday. Levels were recorded as strong but other solar storms have been more severe.
 
Sunday?s solar eruption was followed by a one-two-three punch, according to Antti Pulkkinen, a physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and Catholic University.
 
First came electromagnetic radiation, followed by radiation in the form of protons.
 
There was also a coronal mass ejection of plasma from the sun itself  that traveled out into space at 2 million miles per hour.
 
It?s the Sun?s outflow of plasma that have caused much some noticeable problems on Earth, such as electrical grid outages and the  1989 blackout in Quebec.

Date Posted: 27-Jan-2012

THE WORKOUT BUZZ

Pre-workout supplements are providing a big hit with maximum energy buzz for combat training.

Products containing ingredients that are banned in competitive sports are in widespread use while there is definite "trend" towards young people using ?energy lifters? that are as socially acceptable as a cup of coffee.

The list of ingredients on many of the energy products reads like a pharmacology list.

Fabian Di Marco, a 26-year-old personal trainer from Sydney who runs an online supplements company, says there are dozens of pre-workout products on the market.

He says the range continues to grow as demand increases.

"When we first started we were probably only making about 10 per cent of sales for pre-workout supplements, now they probably account for 35 per cent, so it's more than doubled", he said.

He says although every product is different, the baseline ingredients are similar.

"Most pre-workout supplements have things like electrolytes, amino acids, arginine, glutamine, caffeine, and a lot of them have nitric oxide", he said.

Some pre-workout supplements are required to have reduced dosages of ingredients like DMAA.

But the problems occur when the formula is misused or sold incorrectly.

Greg Shaw, a senior sports dietician who specialises in supplementation, agrees the public need to be better educated in terms of what they are consuming.

He says in the past 12 months, many athletes have returned positive doping tests after taking pre-workout supplements and not realising what was in them.

One 25-year-old Australian office worker says she and her friends take pre-workout supplements three times a week on average.

"It seems to give you intense focus", she said.

Date Posted: 26-Jan-2012

YEAR OF DRAGON FRUIT

If you're in the business of growing dragon fruit, then the Chinese New Year is a good one.

Not only is 2012 the year of the dragon, but demand for the tropical fruit always peaks during the New Year celebrations.

Located just outside of Darwin in the Northern Territory, Marcus Karlsson manages one of Australia's largest dragon fruit farms.

Karlsson says the weeks leading up to the Chinese New Year have been flat out.

"It's been pretty hectic", he said.

"We did close to 4,000 trays between Christmas and the start of January, and we're getting ready to fire up again."

Karlsson hopes the Chinese year of the dragon is a good omen for his property.

During the celebrations for the Chinese New Year, demand also increased for the little tropical fruit known as a longan.

A longan is a small, sweet Asian fruit, which is closely related to the lychee. The word longan comes from the Chinese word meaning "dragon eye".

Date Posted: 25-Jan-2012

BUGS MAKING NEW ENERGY

Genetically engineered microbes are being used to process brown seaweed into biofuel.

The work by researchers including Dr Yasuo Yoshikuni from Seattle's Bio-Architecture Lab could see large underwater farms become a source of renewable energy.

Scientists focused on brown seaweed because its high sugar content provides a good biomass, and the seaweed doesn't compete with food crops for land and fresh water.

However Yoshikuni explains that the seaweed uses a different type of carbohydrate called an alginate which can't be broken down by the land based E. coli bacteria normally used in industry".

"This bottleneck means biofuel from seaweed is too expensive to compete with regular petroleum-based fuels", says Yoshikuni.

To overcome the problem, Yoshikuni and colleagues examined a marine microbe called Vibrio splendidus, which naturally metabolises and consumes seaweed in the ocean.

"We don't know if we can scale up these microbes so we genetically engineered terrestrial E. coli microbes instead", said Yoshikuni.

Yoshikuni and colleagues successfully isolated a 36,000 base pair DNA fragment from V. splendidus, which encodes enzymes that metabolise alginate.

"Using synthetic biology and enzyme engineering, the DNA strand was spliced into the E. coli bacteria, which was then able to digest the sugar polymers in the seaweed converting them into ethanol," says Yoshikuni

The researchers say if this process can be successfully scaled-up, seaweed could help meet the growing demand for sustainable fuel.

According to Yoshikuni there are already commercial processes for aqua farming of seaweed especially in Asia with 15 million tonnes produced annually.

"Using three per cent of the world's coastlines we can replace five per cent of total oil consumption. That's 60 billion gallons of fuel".

Date Posted: 24-Jan-2012

?POISONOUS? ENERGY DRINKS

An increase in reports of caffeine poisoning in young people has led to calls for health warnings on energy drinks.

But the industry says consumers need to take personal responsibility, saying energy drinks are already marked as containing caffeine.

Research published in the Medical Journal of Australia shows 65 people called the New South Wales Poisons Centre with problems caused by energy drinks in 2010, up from 12 people in 2004.

The average caller was 17 years old, and in some cases callers reported hallucinations, seizures and heart problems.

The study found symptoms were most frequently reported when energy drinks were being used for recreational use by teenagers and young adults. Co-ingestants included alcohol, caffeine tablets and illicit substances.

But symptoms were also reported when the drinks were consumed at the manufacture-recommended level.

Poisons Centre medical director Dr Naren Gunja says it is difficult to say how much caffeine is too much.

"It's quite variable. It depends on the person and their size. Someone small can handle less caffeine than somebody else, but also two people of the same size, they may have different sensitivities to caffeine", he said.

"People think energy drinks are fine because of packaging and branding, but they're jut as bad as 20 cups of coffee".

Date Posted: 23-Jan-2012

WHALES ARE SELF-AWARE

There is now ample scientific evidence that capacities once thought to be unique to humans are shared by whales.

Like humans, whales and dolphins are 'persons'. That is, they are self-aware beings with individual personalities and a rich inner life and have the ability to think abstractly, feel deeply and choose their actions.

Their lives are characterized by close, long-term relationships with conspecifics in communities characterized by culture. In short, whales and dolphins are a who, not a what.

The good news is that the scientific community is gradually recognising the importance of these ethical issues.

For example, more marine mammal scientists are steering away from doing research on captive dolphins.

More significantly, a small group of experts who met at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in the spring of 2010 to evaluate the ethical implications of the scientific research on cetaceans concluded that the evidence merited issuing a Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans: Whales and Dolphins.