Scientists discover new link to El Niño

Energy & EnvironmentJon Cartwright

Variations in Arctic stratospheric ozone can affect the tropospheric climate at middle-to-high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere and all the way down to the tropics, according to researchers in China.

The result suggests a key stepping stone in the known connection between Arctic stratospheric ozone and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and so could help to predict the ENSO, the researchers say.

“Oceanic, tropospheric, and stratospheric [variations] are all tightly coupled,” said Jianping Li of Beijing Normal University. “[Our study] reinforces the need for climate models to include fully coupled stratospheric dynamical-radiative-chemical processes if they are to more accurately simulate and predict future climate variations.” […]

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India’s cycling ‘sweet spot’

Energy & EnvironmentJon Cartwright

Cycling and other non-motorized transport could help India simultaneously reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and improve public health.

That’s the conclusion of researchers in Germany and Austria, who analyzed Indian household survey data to understand the trade-offs associated with energy usage in a country experiencing rapid urbanization.

Non-motorized transport presents an attractive “sweet spot” for development, whilst other policies, such as improving access to modern cooking fuels, could dramatically lower morbidity while increasing emissions only moderately, the team showed. […]

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Sun like it hot

HorizonJon Cartwright

Few would be surprised to learn that the sun is very, very hot. At its surface, the temperature is several thousand degrees Celsius.

But you might think that, like a fire, the temperature drops as you move away from the surface. In fact, way out in the sun’s corona (the outermost part of its atmosphere) the temperature rises swiftly – to several million degrees.

The reason is a mystery, but now some scientists believe they’re on the verge of finding out.

Dr Sven Wedemeyer of the University of Oslo in Norway is one such scientist. He is working on a project called SolarALMA, funded by the EU’s European Research Council (ERC) to analyse groundbreaking data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an expansive radio observatory in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert. […]

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Physics in the dark

Physics WorldJon Cartwright

Modern technologies and educational policies aim to make physics fully accessible to the blind. But just how easy is it for the sightless, asks Jon Cartwright

Every age has its great teachers, and in the early 18th century one of them was Nicholas Saunderson (1682–1739). From 1711 till his death, Saunderson was the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in the UK – a post held just a few years previously by Isaac Newton, and in recent times by Stephen Hawking. He would lecture to packed halls for at least eight hours a day on subjects ranging from mechanics and hydrostatics, to optics and astronomy. He was said to have a tremendous feel for his subject. Literally, as it turns out: he was blind.

Times were certainly tough 300 years ago for the sightless. Having lost his eyes to smallpox as a baby, Saunderson is said to have taught himself to read by tracing out the letters on gravestones. Yet he was luckier with his situation than most. His father and his friends supplemented his school education by reading to him at length, and in his teens he made a learned acquaintance who brought him up to speed with the latest developments in mathematics. His ultimate accession to Lucasian professor was doubly impressive, for the university’s decision went against the wishes of Newton himself – and there are not many known instances of that.

Is it any easier to be a blind physicist today? Inclusive education policies, leaps in technology and a better awareness of the needs of the disabled all suggest a positive answer, yet blind physicists seem to be few and far between. Perhaps the most famous living example is the US astronomer Kent Cullers, whose involvement in NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) programme was fictionalized in the 1997 blockbuster Contact. “We’re in a sighted person’s world,” says Aqil Sajjad, a blind theoretical physicist who lives in Boston, US. […]

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We need action on the low-carbon technology targets – Tor Ivar Eikaas

HorizonJon Cartwright

It is critical that we deliver on the targets for low-carbon technologies in the 2020s, 2030s and beyond which have been set as part of the EU’s Strategic Energy Technology (SET) Plan, according to Tor Ivar Eikaas, a special adviser at the Research Council of Norway and a long-standing representative of the SET-Plan steering group.

The SET-Plan began 10 years ago with the aim of accelerating the development and deployment of low-carbon technologies. Are we on our way?

‘You do see continuous improvements and rollout of new technology. You see it for photovoltaics and offshore wind, you see smart cities and energy storage. These are all good examples.

‘Hopefully what we are now seeing is a clear change from planning to action, and from technology development towards more innovation. We are also seeing a more holistic view of the whole energy system where the whole system (is) interacting in a much stronger way. Like computer systems – in the past they were small and isolated, then we got the internet and they all became connected. It’s a similar shift.’ […]

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Surface water could refill Californian groundwater supplies

Energy & EnvironmentJon Cartwright

California’s groundwater “overdraft” could be paid off by redirecting high levels of flow in streams, rivers, reservoirs and other water channels, according to researchers in the US.

“There is enough water physically available to mitigate long-term groundwater overdraft,” said Helen Dahlke of the University of California, Davis. “We just have to manage it more efficiently.”

In years of high streamflow, the team’s analysis shows, over three cubic kilometres of excess surface water is exported from California’s Central Valley to the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, often when the required flows of the delta and its major rivers are exceeded. That’s potentially enough to boost or even replenish groundwater levels, over time. […]

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Opposite stuff

New ScientistJon Cartwright

A weird, self-destructive blend of opposite stuffs briefly reigned at the birth of the universe. Recreating it could crack the nut of nuclear fusion

A FRACTION of a second after the big bang, a new type of stuff flooded the universe. It was hot, it was self-destructive and it was weird. It wasn’t matter. It wasn’t antimatter. It was both.

This was the electron-positron plasma, a perfect balance of electrons and their antimatter equivalent. Within seconds, it had blinked itself out of existence: electrons and positrons annihilate on contact, their mass converting entirely into energy.

In some of the universe’s biggest explosions, that process can be reversed, as pure energy spawns matter and antimatter. So we don’t have to go all the way back to the big bang to understand the plasma – its hallmarks are all around us in these mysterious flashes lighting up the night sky.

Just recently, too, we’ve gone one better, replicating in the lab what normally takes place in an exploding star. That’s no trivial undertaking, and raises the question of why we would want to. The reason is that the unique qualities of an electron-positron plasma makes it the ideal test bed for understanding the fundamental workings of more readily available plasmas. And if we can do that, there might be nothing stopping us from unlocking nuclear fusion, a theoretically limitless source of clean, safe power that could solve all our climate woes. […]

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Mystery of crucial first moments of Chernobyl disaster solved

Chemistry WorldJon Cartwright

Saturday 26 April 1986 was a day that shook the world. At 1.23 am, the number 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant near Pripyat, Ukraine, leapt to more than 100 times its usual operating power. As a result, high pressure steam in the reactor vessel exploded and parts of the reactor shot through the roof of the building, igniting fires that ejected highly radioactive nuclides over much of the western Soviet Union and Europe.

At least, that’s the sequence of events many experts have agreed on. Now, scientists in Sweden have reanalysed data from the event, and concluded that the first explosion in the Chernobyl disaster was due not to steam, but to a runaway nuclear reaction.

The new conclusions do not revise the underlying cause of the disaster. That is widely believed to be the operators’ decision, less than an hour earlier, to proceed with a long-awaited experiment to see how the reactor would cope under a power outage, despite a series of operational failures leaving it in a potentially unstable state. After the recovery did not go to plan, witnesses reported two major explosions just a few seconds apart. […]

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Arctic routes are seasonally predictable

Energy & EnvironmentJon Cartwright

It’s possible to predict the existence of viable shipping routes through the Arctic several months in advance, according to scientists in the UK.

The ability is a boon for shipping companies hoping to exploit Arctic routes, which are becoming more accessible due to declining sea ice in the region.

In principle, predictions of the opening and closing of the Arctic shipping season can be made as early as January, the researchers found, although there is a step-change to much higher predictability after May. By July, two months before the usual sea-ice minimum, it should be possible to predict the fastest open-water route through the Arctic to within 200 kilometres, the scientists believe.

“Skilful predictions at seasonal timescales are rare in the climate and meteorology world,” said Nathanael Melia of the University of Reading. “This study establishes that skilful seasonal predictions for the availability of Arctic shipping routes are potentially possible.” […]

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