As mistresses go, blogging, I’ve found, is among the harshest.

Hence the schedule I’ve tried to enforce:

* Monday, neglected books from my bookshelf

* Tuesday, science news (usually astrophysics because, in my fantasies, I’m an astrophysicist who unravels the mysteries of an alien invasion like the clever, but ineffective scientist in George Pal’s 1953 version of War of the Worlds)

* Wednesday, politics or, our chaotic world

* Thursday, technology and gadgetry

* Friday, something whimsical

But even this attempt at self-discipline fails. No doubt, because of the “self” portion of that hyphenated formation.

However, once more into the breach…

Today’s science post swooshes, with a dramatic, Hollywood CGI flourish, from the massive stars burning hot in the depths of space to the realm of the very small: tree pollen. As I type these words my eyes are running, my body aches, my nose noisily expresses displeasure and other parts quietly marvel at the overall disintegration of my (fragile, oh so fragile) sense of well being.

Hay fever is the cause.

But what is hay fever?

Off we go to Wikipedia, my new god (the old one, Landru, having failed me for the final time):

Allergies are caused by an oversensitive immune system, leading to a misdirected immune response. The immune system normally protects the body against harmful substances such as bacteria and viruses. Allergy occurs when the immune system reacts to substances (allergens) that are generally harmless and in most people do not cause an immune response.

As noted above, hay fever involves an allergic reaction to pollen. A virtually identical reaction occurs with allergy to mold, animal dander, dust, and similar inhaled allergens. Particulate matter in polluted air and chemicals such as chlorine and detergents, which can normally be tolerated, can greatly aggravate the condition.

The pollens that cause hay fever vary from person to person and from region to region; generally speaking, the tiny, hardly visible pollens of wind-pollinated plants are the predominant culprits. Pollens of insect-pollinated plants are too large to remain airborne and pose no risk. Examples of plants commonly responsible for hay fever include:

* Trees: such as birch (Betula), alder (Alnus), hazel (Corylus), hornbeam (Carpinus), horse chestnut (Aesculus), willow (Salix), poplar (Populus), plane (Platanus), linden/lime (Tilia) and olive (Olea). In northern latitudes birch is considered to be the most important allergenic tree pollen, with an estimated 15-20% of hay fever sufferers sensitive to birch pollen grains. Olive pollen is more important in Mediterranean regions.

* Grasses (Family Poaceae): especially rye (Lolium sp.) and timothy (Phleum pratense). An estimated 90% of hay fever sufferers are allergic to grass pollen.

* Weeds:ragweed (Ambrosia), plantain (Plantago), nettle/parietaria (Urticaceae), mugwort (Artemisia), Fat hen (Chenopodium) and sorrel/dock (Rumex)

In addition to individual sensitivity and geographic differences in local plant populations, the amount of pollen in the air can be a factor in whether hay fever symptoms develop. Hot, dry, windy days are more likely to have increased amounts of pollen in the air than cool, damp, rainy days when most pollen is washed to the ground.

[...]

full at Wikipedia…

Let’s review:

The launch platform

The multiple targeted warheads

The pathetic resistance

The expensive countermeasure

I must confess this is something I’ve thought about in the dark and quiet moments of 3 am.

Hubble Site reports…

Homeowners may have to worry about floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes destroying their homes, but at least they can remove long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) from their list of potential natural disasters, according to recent findings by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

Long-duration gamma-ray bursts are powerful flashes of high-energy radiation that are sometimes seen coming from certain types of supernovae (the explosions of extremely massive stars). If Earth were flashed by a nearby long-duration burst, the devastation could range from destroying the ozone in our atmosphere to triggering climate change and altering life’s evolution.

Suspecting that knowledge of their environments might help determine what types of stars produce gamma-ray bursts, the astronomers, led by Andrew Fruchter of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., used Hubble to examine the environments of 42 long-duration bursts and 16 supernovae. They found that the small fraction of supernovae that produce the bursts live in a very different environment from the average supernova. Fruchter’s results appear in the May 10 online edition of the journal Nature.

Fruchter’s team found that most of the long bursts in the sample were detected in small, faint, misshapen, (irregular) galaxies, which are usually deficient in heavier elements. Only one of the bursts was spotted in a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way, suggesting that our galaxy is an unlikely host for long-duration bursts. By contrast, the hosts of supernovae were divided equally between spiral and irregular galaxies, those with greater or smaller concentrations of the heavier elements.

Fruchter’s team also found that long bursts are far more concentrated in the brightest regions of their host galaxies where the most massive stars reside. Supernovae, on the other hand, occur throughout their host galaxies.

[...]

full

via the BBC…

US scientists have successfully implanted bladders grown in the laboratory from patients’ own cells into people with bladder disease.

The researchers, from North Carolina’s Wake Forest University, have carried out seven transplants, and in some the organ is working well years later.

The achievement, details of which have been published online by The Lancet, is being described as a “milestone”.

The team is now working to grow organs including hearts using the technique.

[...]

full at the BBC…

Existential Christian blogger Adam Kotsko writes:

The Reason Jesus Hasn’t Come Back Yet

Around the turn of the century, many biblical scholars, led by Johannes Weiss, claimed that the historical Jesus expected the parousia to come in a very short time. Since that did not occur, Jesus was mistaken in his expectation, and theology must come to terms with that.

While such a theory has much to recommend it, it neglects a simple fact: after his resurrection, Jesus was fully capable of bringing about the parousia at his leisure. His mistake was not so much in the timing of the parousia as in his ignorance of basic physical laws. Simply put, at the time of his ascension, Jesus did not realize what is now taken for granted: namely, that above the earth’s atmosphere, one does not find “heaven” as traditionally conceived, but rather the vast expanses of outer space.

Nor, we might suppose, was Christ fully acquainted with the workings of the resurrection body. While he showed himself to be quite adept at the various tricks the resurrection body could perform within the created world (changing his appearance, walking through walls, etc.), he was apparently ignorant of the way to enter the heavenly realm. Typically stubborn man that he was, he refused to ask the angels for directions. Determined that he knew how to get there — after all, he had been there before and in fact used to live there — Jesus ascended vertically, expecting to find “heaven” above the “firmament” of the sky.

From this crucial miscalculation follows the most horrible tragedy in the history of the cosmos.

[...]

full at the source

Outposts for Ether

Los Angeles is the capital of ether, but cities throughout the world are dominated by its silent outposts. Carrier hotels, telecom hotels, data hotels, carrier neutral collocation facilities, exchanges, and switching stations are generally found in the densest part of a city. Los Angeles is remarkable because of the concentration of ether into one structure and because of the density of ether’s production in that city. By contrast, in Manhattan, there are half a dozen buildings devoted largely to telecommunications. Two structures serve to demonstrate the typologies and approaches taken in Manhattan and other cities.

32 Avenue of the Americas was designed by Ralph Walker and built in 1932 to house AT&T’s offices and equipment for transatlantic communications. 32 Avenue of the Americas has been remodeled by Tyco International to serve as the New York TelExchange Center. Tenants are encouraged to take advantage of Tyco’s transatlantic fiber optic network, which terminates here.

The AT&T Long Lines Building at 33 Thomas Street was built in 1974, designed by John Carl Warnecke & Associates. If One Wilshire is “a decorated shed,” Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown would call the Long Lines building a “duck,” its function indissociable from its form. Clad in pink Swedish granite, the Long Lines Building was built to resist nuclear blast and fallout and to be self-sufficient for two weeks. Each floor is 6 meters in height, providing room for AT&T’s equipment. Unlike One Wilshire or 32 Avenue of the Americas, this facility is only for AT&T, the largest telecommunications company in the United States.

full at The Ether Project

Virus used to make nanoparticles

UK scientists from Norwich have used a plant virus to create nanotechnology building blocks.

The virus, which infects black-eyed peas, was employed as a “scaffold” on to which other chemicals were attached.

By linking iron-containing compounds to the virus’s surface, the John Innes Centre team was able to create electronically active nanoparticles.

The researchers tell the journal Small that their work could be used in the future to make tiny electrical devices.

The work is yet another example of how scientists are now trying to engineer objects on the scale of atoms and molecules.

At the nanoscale, materials can be “tuned” to display unusual properties that could be exploited to build faster, lighter, stronger and more efficient devices and systems.

more here…

Artificial Muscles Powered by Highly Energetic Fuels

RICHARDSON, Texas (March 16, 2006) — University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) nanotechnologists have made alcohol- and hydrogen-powered artificial muscles that are 100 times stronger than natural muscles, able to do 100 times greater work per cycle and produce, at reduced strengths, larger contractions than natural muscles. Among other possibilities, these muscles could enable fuel-powered artificial limbs, “smart skins” and morphing structures for air and marine vehicles, autonomous robots having very long mission capabilities and smart sensors that detect and self-actuate to change the environment.

While humans on long, strenuous missions are able to carry the food that powers their bodies, today’s most athletically capable robots cannot freely move about, since they are wired to stationary electrical power sources. Though batteries can be used for autonomous robots, they store too little energy and deliver it at too low a rate for prolonged or intense activity. To solve these problems, the team from UTD’s NanoTech Institute developed two different types of artificial muscles that, like natural muscles, convert the chemical energy of an energetic fuel to mechanical energy.

The breakthroughs are described in the March 17 issue of the prestigious journal Science .

more-osity here…

Sandia’s Z Machine Exceeds Two Billion Degrees Kelvin; Temperatures Hotter Than The Interiors Of Stars

Sandia’s Z machine has produced plasmas that exceed temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin — hotter than the interiors of stars.

The unexpectedly hot output, if its cause were understood and harnessed, could eventually mean that smaller, less costly nuclear fusion plants would produce the same amount of energy as larger plants.

The phenomena also may explain how astrophysical entities like solar flares maintain their extreme temperatures.

The very high radiation output also creates new experimental environments to help validate computer codes responsible for maintaining a reliable nuclear weapons stockpile safely and securely — the principle mission of the Z facility.

“At first, we were disbelieving,” says Sandia project lead Chris Deeney. “We repeated the experiment many times to make sure we had a true result and not an ‘Ooops’!”

The results, recorded by spectrometers and confirmed by computer models created by John Apruzese and colleagues at Naval Research Laboratory, have held up over 14 months of additional tests.

A description of the achievement, as well as a possible explanation by Sandia consultant Malcolm Haines, well-known for his work in Z pinches at the Imperial College in London, appeared in the Feb. 24 Physical Review Letters.

[...]

go further here.

Trace the source here

Because this wee blog is henceforth on a subject schedule – enforced with dialectic vigour- to squeeze the most juice out of the bloggy fruit and make the most of finite time, Tuesday is now science talk day. Time to dive, without fear of wind or vertigo, into the wild mysteries of the Queen of endeavors.

What I find most intriguing about this bit of news (if, that is, the science media’s interpretation of the proposal are correct and my interpretation of their interpretation is also reasonably true and oh, if the theoretical sketch itself conforms to nature – and these are surely non-trivial “ifs”) is the lovely idea that maybe, maybe, on a random day – a Tuesday, perhaps – you might be sitting in an open air cafe in Vienna or Ho Chi Minh City or Brasilia enjoying the morning when quietly, all that you knew is entirely replaced or subtly altered, or simply, destroyed.

The moon was always covered with a lush, green jungle, Jupiter was always the lesser sun.   Or…there is no Jupiter.

from the New Scientist

Is our universe about to be mangled?

Maggie McKee

Our universe may one day be obliterated or assimilated by a larger universe, according to a controversial new analysis. The work suggests the parallel universes proposed by some quantum theorists may not actually be parallel but could interact – and with disastrous consequences.

Random quantum fluctuations mean the behaviour of particles and photons of light cannot be predicted exactly. The quantum equations that describe them contain a variety of different – and opposing – outcomes in their solution, such as a particular particle causing a bell to both ring and not ring in an experimental setup. Physicists then have to use an equation called the Born rule to calculate the probability of the bell ringing, and countless experiments have shown the rule works.

But researchers have long struggled to understand why a bell will ring – or not ring – in any given run of an experiment, since in theory it has the option of doing both. This conundrum, known as the quantum measurement problem, has led a small subset of physicists to argue that in fact the bell does do both – but that each possible outcome takes place in a different, parallel universe that pops into existence during the experiment.

“This is what the math suggests if you take it literally,” says Robin Hanson of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, US. But the idea that “every microsecond, the universe splits into a bunch more universes boggles the mind.”

continuance here…