Black Holes

Scientific American 

Carbon Nanotubes Turn Office Paper into Batteries

What makes Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo more than just a high-flying plane?

With all the hubbub surrounding the Monday unveiling of Richard Branson's new SpaceShipTwo, billed by Virgin Galactic as "the world's first manned commercial spaceship," some of us began to wonder: What makes a spaceship a spaceship? After all, the flights that Virgin Galactic is hawking for $200,000 do not put passengers into orbit. And as for one of the purported thrills of space tourism, weightlessness, that experience is attainable at or below altitudes reached in a typical commercial airline flight-- in NASA's "vomit comets," for instance . [More]

HIV-related memory loss shares similarity with Alzheimer's

Many people living with HIV report having memory loss or other cognitive problems that can sound a lot like early-onset Alzheimer's disease . Unlike their senior counterparts, however, cognitively impaired people with HIV are often in their 40s and 50s--and the early decline can make it difficult to hold jobs and maintain personal lives. [More]

Copenhagen climate conference kicks off

To be or not to be? That is the question. Will 192 world governments agree in the next two weeks on a framework to cut emissions of greenhouse gases and thereby combat climate change? Or will they dither and divide at the Copenhagen climate summit , as they did with previous efforts, including the ineffectual Kyoto Protocol ? [More]

U.S. EPA moves on emissions as Congress stalls

By Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency formally declared that greenhouse gases endanger human health Monday, allowing President Barack Obama to show his commitment to act as a major climate change summit opened in Copenhagen. [More]

Spirit rover budges forward, but not by much

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Newspapers Worldwide Call for Climate Change Action

It's like the publishing version of one of those scenes from a sci-fi movie where an alien invasion impels traditional adversaries to join together to face their larger, common threat. Today 56 newspapers, in Pakistan and India, in Israel and Lebanon, in Tawian and China, in Greece and Turkey, in Africa and in North, South and Central America are publishing an unprecedented joint editorial calling for meaningful action to face the threat posed by climate change. The editorial, published in 45 countries in 20 different languages, appears on this first day of the Copenhagen climate conference. The British paper the Guardian led the effort, which involved weeks of negotiations to reach a final version. The editorial notes that "the science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2 degrees C...a bigger rise of 3 to 4 degrees C would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based." [More]

Arctic Climate Threat--Methane from Thawing Permafrost (preview)

Touchdown on the gravel runway at Cherskii in remote northeastern Siberia sent the steel toe of a rubber boot into my buttocks. The shoe had sprung free from gear stuffed between me and my three colleagues packed into a tiny prop plane. This was the last leg of my research team's five-day journey from the University of Alaska Fairbanks across Russia to the Northeast Science Station in the land of a million lakes, which we were revisiting as part of our ongoing efforts to monitor a stirring giant that could greatly speed up global warming. These expeditions help us to understand how much of the perennially frozen ground, known as permafrost, in Siberia and across the Arctic is thawing, or close to thawing, and how much methane the process could generate. The question grips us--and many scientists and policy makers--because methane is a potent greenhouse gas, packing 25 times more heating power, molecule for molecule, than carbon dioxide. If the permafrost thaws rapidly because of global warming worldwide, the planet could get hotter more quickly than most models now predict. Our data, combined with complementary analyses by others, are revealing troubling trends. [More]

Lightweight "triple-zero" house produces more energy than it uses

NEW YORK--Overlooking the city of Stuttgart in southern Germany, a four-story modern glass house stands like a beacon of environmental sustainability. Built in 2000, it was the first in a series of buildings that are "triple-zero," a concept developed by German architect and engineer Werner Sobek, which signifies that the building is energy self-sufficient (zero energy consumed), produces zero emissions, and is made entirely of recyclable materials (zero waste). [More]

Scientists Respond to "Climategate" E-Mail Controversy

With all the "hot air" surrounding climate change discussions, none has been hotter in recent weeks than that spewed over a trove of stolen e-mails and computer code from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England. Longstanding contrarians, such as Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who famously dubbed climate change a "hoax" in a 2003 speech, has pointed to the stolen e-mails as information that overturns the scientific evidence for global warming and called on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson to halt any development of regulation of greenhouse gases pending his investigation into the e-mails. And recent polls have found that fewer Americans today than just two years ago believe that greenhouse gases will cause average temperatures to increase--a drop from 71 percent to 51 percent . [More]