WcP.ScientificMind's blog

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Ice sculptures constructed from the spare core samples by the scientists working on the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling project.

The ice samples, which the researchers analyze for clues to the temperature and concentration of greenhouse gases of the ancient atmosphere, are collected using this drill.

The visiting group of scientists, journalists and Danish environmental officials land at NEEM, the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling project. NEEM had arranged for the visitors to examine their research, which focuses on the climatic conditions which shaped the warm geologic period before the earth's last Ice Age, an important clue in understanding global warming. The camp is located approximately 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

The scientists are drilling deep into the ice, which is 1.5 miles thick, the accumulation of 130,000 years of snow. These researchers are taking ice near the surface, which can help them analyze the last few hundred years of climatic history.

The main drill, which will excavate the deepest ice cores, is being built in this underground site.

The tour also included a visit to the coastal town of Ilulissat, home to one of the most productive glaciers in the world. A tour of Disko Bay, outside the town, revealed massive icebergs floating in the water, the product of accelerated melting.

The main graveyard in Ilulissat, just outside the town, overlooks the icebergs of Disko Bay.

Pools of melted water slice through the Ilulissat icefjord, which is fed by the melting Sermeq Kujalleq glacier.

Greenland has lost an average of 150 billion tons of ice a year over the past four summers.

In 2004, UNESCO declared the Ilulissat icefjord a World Heritage site.

Every year, the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier surrenders around 20 billion tons of icebergs into the ocean. Most of them end up in the northern Atlantic.

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Original Source and Photos courtesy of: Time

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The one Lun-class ekranoplan originally developed by the Soviet Union military transports, and based mostly on the shores of the Caspian Sea and Black, at a naval base near Kaspiysk. During the Cold War, ekranoplans were sighted for years on the Caspian Sea as huge, fast-moving objects. The name Caspian Sea Monster was given by US intelligence operatives who had spotted the huge vehicle, which looked like an airplane with the outer halves of the wings removed. After the end of the Cold War, the "monster" was revealed to be one of several Soviet military designs meant to fly only a few meters above water, saving energy and staying below enemy radar.

The 8-engined sea skimmer could have been a deadly weapon of war with it’s 6 ‘Sunburn’ anti-ship missiles and ability to travel at high speed under the radar of patrol aircraft. The Lun-class (Russian: "Hen Harrier") (NATO reporting name: "Utka"; Russian: "Duck") ekranoplan Wing-In-Ground effect vehicle was an extremely unusual aircraft designed by Rostislav Evgenievich Alexeev and used by the Soviet & Russian navies from 1987 to sometime in the late '90s. Wing-in-ground-effect aircraft use the extra lift of their large wings when in proximity to the surface (about one to four meters). It is also interesting to note that this is the largest military aircraft ever built, with a length of 73m, rivaling that of the Hughes H-4 Hercules "Spruce Goose" and many modern jumbo jets.

Currently the world's largest aircraft, the first Antonov An-225 Mriya (meaning "Dream") proto- type flew on 21 Dec. 1988. It was designed and built by Antonov Design Bureau (headquarters in Kiev, Ukraine), known for their outstanding achievements in producing heavy transport aircraft. It is the largest aircraft to ever takeoff more than once. Capable of transporting oversized objects externally, the An-225 was designed mainly to transport the Russian space shuttle "Buran" and its components from a service area to a launch site, although the Antonov bureau is looking for possible commercial applications for the enormous aircraft.

Construction of the An-124 provided the basis for the new aircraft with Antonov using many of the same components to keep cost and development efforts down. Although the basic configuration is the same as the An-124, the An-225 is longer, has no rear ramp/door assembly, and incorporates a 32-wheel landing gear system (two nose and fourteen main wheel bogies, seven per side, each with two wheels). The Mriya is not a military aircraft, however, it packs a great potential for military use as a super-heavy transport, it is capable of airlifting cargos that no other aircraft in the world is capable of.

The Hughes H-4 Hercules (registration NX37602) is a "one-off" heavy transport aircraft designed and built by the Hughes Aircraft company. The aircraft made its first and only flight on 2 November 1947. Built from wood due to wartime raw material restrictions on the use of aluminum, the Hercules is the largest flying boat ever built, and has the largest wingspan and height of any aircraft in history. It survives in good condition at the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.

The 555 seat, double deck Airbus A380 is the most ambitious civil aircraft program yet. Airbus first began studies on a very large 500 seat airliner in the early 1990s. The European manufacturer saw developing a competitor and successor to the Boeing 747 as a strategic play to end Boeing's dominance of the very large airliner market and round out Airbus' product line-up.

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Photos courtesy of flightsimx.co.uk, BusinessWeek, Wikipedia, AFP

Original Source: Wikipedia, FlightSimX, The Aviation Zone, and Airliners.net

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When Royal Caribbean launches its $1.2 billion 'Oasis of the Sea' in 2009, it will carry up to 5,400 passengers and will be as tall as a 12-story building, as long as four football fields, and wider than the Panama Canal.

Formidably awesome – a floating city.

The question is - at sea, the bigger, the better?

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Photos courtesy of Robert Polidori

Original Source: CNN

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The new Moon drew its shadow across Earth's Eastern Hemisphere earlier today, totally eclipsing the Sun along a track that crossed the Arctic, Siberia, and interior China. Thousands of eclipse chasers had stationed themselves along the path in anticipation. The Moon's shadow arced over the Earth as the lunar body passed directly between our planet and its star. In all, the path of darkness covered about 10,200km (6,300 miles). Russia saw the longest full eclipse, for two minutes, 27 seconds, at 1021 GMT - but the UK and most of Europe experienced just a partial eclipse.

"Totality" began at sunrise at 0921 GMT in Queen Maud Gulf off Victoria Island in the territory of Nunavut, Canada. The instant of greatest eclipse occurred at 1021 GMT close to the Russian city of Nadym, before totality came to an end at 1121 GMT near the Chinese city of Xi'an, in Shaanxi province.

Tourists and amateur and professional astronomers flocked to towns in the best viewing locations along the path of totality. In Novosibirsk, Siberia's cultural and scientific capital, more than 5,000 foreign tourists were expected to show up in the city. China experienced the eclipse just a week before the opening ceremony of Beijing's Olympic Games. Chinese TV was due to broadcast the eclipse live, with crowds of people gathered along the Silk Road, a fabled trading route through the country's western deserts. Eclipses were once viewed as unlucky events in China, but the country's media had rebranded the event as "the Olympic eclipse", reports said, hoping for good fortune ahead of the sporting jamboree.

The eclipse allowed astronomers a glimpse of the Sun's corona - its outer atmosphere of super-heated gases. The area is usually impossible to see because of the bright light of the Sun, but is visible during a total eclipse as the Sun's light is obscured. Total solar eclipses usually take place about once every 18 months, and always at new Moon - when the lunar body sits directly between the Sun and the Earth. However, they do not happen every new Moon. The lunar orbit is slightly tilted to that of our planet and therefore the Moon's shadow often misses the Earth.

The world's next total eclipse of the Sun comes less than a year from now, on July 22, 2009. It will begin at sunrise in India, cross parts of Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, and thickly inhabited areas of China, and will end at sunset over the South Pacific. The next total solar eclipse for North America comes on August 21, 2017. The path of totality will sweep from Oregon to South Carolina.

The Moon's shadow has two parts: an umbra and a penumbra. The umbra is the "inner" part of the Moon's shadow, and people inside this zone will witness the full glory of the eclipse. The penumbra is the Moon's faint "outer" shadow. It will only give surface viewers a partial eclipse.

In London, where the Moon's disc took its biggest bite out of the Sun at 1016 BST (0916 GMT), a maximum of 12% of the star was blotted out. Conditions were better further north. In Lerwick in the Shetland Isles, the Moon obscured as much as 36% of the Sun.

Astronomical groups reminded the public that viewing the Sun without protective equipment - even in partial eclipse phases - could result in a retinal burn and permanent eye damage. Viewing the Sun's harsh light should only be done through proper solar telescopes or glasses, or through a pinhole projection system.

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Photos courtesy of Joe Rao, EPA/Toms Kalnins and John Sun

Original Source: BBC News (with videos) and Sky & Telescope

Related Article: Solar Eclipse Wows Airborne Skywatchers Over Arctic Circle

Image Gallery: In photos: 'Solar Eclipse Around the World'

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Boasting big plans, startup search engine Cuil (pronounced "cool") launched on Monday. The Cuil in the name is pronounced "Cool," and derives from an old Irish word for knowledge. Tom Costello, a co-founder and the CEO of the company, is from Dorgheda, Ireland. The company sold itself on having indexed more pages than Google, ranking based on context rather than on popularity, and displaying results organized by concept within a beautiful user interface. There was just one problem: when the search engine launched, it didn't work very well. Cuil's site was down intermittently throughout the day on Monday, and even when the site was up, it sometimes returned no results for common queries, or failed to produce the most relevant or up-to-date results. For example, as of Wednesday morning, searching Cuil for its own name returns nothing on the first results page that is related to the engine itself, in spite of the buckets of press it got this week.

"I've seen these sorts of things for all sorts of startups that get launched," says search-engine expert Danny Sullivan, who runs Search Engine Land. "You have issues with how it's displaying results; you have spam showing; you have a lot of duplicate results." But Cuil wasn't supposed to suffer from the common problems that all sorts of startups encounter. Its founders have impressive credentials: Anna Patterson and Russell Power both had major roles in building Google's large search index, and Tom Costello researched search architecture and relevance methods for Stanford University and IBM. On top of the company's talent, Cuil raised a reported $33 million in venture capital. "In many ways, Cuil was the exception," Sullivan says. "They were one of the few people or companies out there where you would say, 'Well, all right, I'd be dubious about anyone else, but if anyone's going to have a chance, you should have a chance.' But they didn't deliver, and I think that makes it even harder now for startups to come along."

One of Cuil's main selling points is the size of its index. Claiming to have indexed 120 billion Web pages, which it states is three times more than any other search engine, the company says, "Size matters because many people use the Internet to find information that is of interest to them, even if it's not popular." But Sullivan notes that relevance may be the most important quality of search. "When you come into the idea of size, that starts getting into the question of obscure search," he says. "The needle-in-the-haystack search sounds so very compelling--the idea that if you don't have a lot of pages, you can't search through the entire haystack. But, as Cuil has demonstrated very well, it doesn't help you to look through the entire haystack if it gets dumped on your head, and all you can see is a bunch of hay out there."

Investor Azeem Azhar, who incubated the startup search engine True Knowledge, notes that while it's useful to have a large base of knowledge, sometimes the sample that's selected matters more. "There are certain things that people expect to have, and there are certain facts that are more useful than others," he says. True Knowledge, which aims at the subset of searchers who are looking for answers to direct questions, is currently working on building up a database of relevant facts that can be used to answer questions such as, "Who was president when Barack Obama was a teenager?" The company hopes that by focusing on facts of broad interest, such as those relating to famous people and places, it will be useful to people even as it solicits responses for them by way of rounding out its database. When a user asks a question that the system can't answer, it returns, "If there are any answers, I couldn't find any"; invites the user to add to the database; and points to traditional search results.

Azhar also notes that it's hard to approach many common search problems directly. For example, while many companies are trying to improve search by parsing documents using natural-language processing or, like Cuil, analyzing them for context, True Knowledge is building a database containing facts and their relations to each other. "It's a testament to how difficult it is to improve automatic understanding of documents that we said we can build a database of 700 million facts more easily," he says.

According to numbers from comScore Inc., Google has 62 percent of the U.S. search-engine market, followed by Yahoo with 21 percent. True Knowledge, which is still in a private experimental release, has no plans to go head to head against the majors. Azhar says that the company may eventually try to sell its services to existing portals as a feature that could enrich traditional search results.

That may be the safer approach. Positioning yourself as an alternative to Google, or, for that matter, to Microsoft's and Yahoo's search engines, is highly unlikely to be a viable strategy at this point, Sullivan says. "[Startups can] really underestimate the amount of work that's involved with the incredible task of trying to compete with Google." Instead, he adds, startup search engines might do better to present themselves as supplementing what the existing major search engines offer, or as providing good results for particular types of content.

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Photos courtesy of Technology Review, ChattahBox, DailyTech

Original Source: Technology Review and Winston-Salem Journal

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We never did get the hovercrafts we were promised as kids, but we're getting closer. Imagine sailing above the Bourne Bridge on your way to the beach, while consuming less gas than the SUVs stuck beneath you in traffic.

A compact, two-seat plane with folding wings that can be pulled behind a car on a trailer will premiere at an air show in Wisconsin next week in a development that heralds a new genre of flying machines designed to bring the power-boating experience to the sky. Developed by two Stanford business school graduates, Kirk Hawkins and Steen Strand, the ICON A5 is the latest and arguably coolest plane to take to the skies under a new classification that the Federal Aviation Administration calls light-sport aircraft.

The A5's top speed is 120 miles per hour, and its maximum altitude is about 10,000 feet, in keeping with its Light-Sport Aircraft classification - a new class created to make personal aviation accessible to more people. It runs on auto gasoline and gets 18 to 20 miles to the gallon, according to Icon.

Ranging from $60,000 for a build-it-yourself kit, to $140,000 for the innovative ICON A5, these two-seat planes let anyone with a valid state driver's license and 20 hours of flying instruction make short flights for travel or pleasure, said Dick Knapinski, spokesman for the air show in Oshkosh, Wis., where the new plane will spread its wings. "This is something new and cutting edge, an aircraft whose wings fold so you can put it on a trailer like a boat or a jet ski," said Knapinski, spokesman for the Experimental Aircraft Association, host for the Wisconsin fly-fest.

ICON Aircraft, the company behind the new plane, was conceived at Stanford in 2005 when Hawkins, a former pilot in the Air Force and for an airline, met Strand, a product designer for IDEO and other Silicon Valley companies. ICON spokeswoman Jennie Bragalone said Hawkins realized that the new FAA licensing and aircraft rules created a niche for an aircraft that was both sexy and space-saving because it could be stored and towed like a boat. "He wants to make flying the next power sport," she said.

ICON, now based in Los Angeles, aims to take its single-plane prototype into volume production with private backing from entrepreneurs like John Dorton, chief executive of Mastercraft Boats and tech maven Esther Dyson. But the Stanford-spawned craft will have to get up to speed fast to compete with European imports, according to a bird's-eye view of the light-sport aircraft market from Chris Dancy, with the 415,000-member Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. Dancy said that when the FAA minted this new sport-plane category in July 2004, firms from the Czech Republic, Italy and Germany flew right into the U.S. market because - space being more precious in Europe - plane-builders there were already turning out craft below the FAA's 1,430-pound weight limit.

It's still early days for this new category. Dancy said about 2,000 sport-plane licenses have been issued so far, compared with more than 200,000 licenses for private planes, which require 40 hours of training and a physical exam. Other U.S. brands include American Legend Aircraft, Aircraft Manufacturing and Development, Cub Crafters and Cessna, he said.

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Photos courtesy of ICON Aircraft

Original Source: SF Chronicle and Boston Globe

Related Article (with video and press photos): ICON Aircraft Successfully Flies ICON A5 Sport Plane Prototype - First test flight completes major milestone

Official Site: ICON Aircraft

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc. opened its website Knol to the public on Wednesday, allowing people to write about their areas of expertise under their bylines in a twist on encyclopedia Wikipedia, which allows anonymity. "We are deeply convinced that authorship -- knowing who wrote what -- helps readers trust the content," said Cedric DuPont, product manager for Knol. The name of the service is a play on an individual unit of knowledge, DuPont said, and entries on the public website, knol.google.com, are called "knols." Google conducted a limited test of the site beginning in December.

Knol has publishing tools similar to single blog pages. But unlike blogs, Knol encourages writers to reduce what they know about a topic to a single page that is not chronologically updated. "What we want to get away from is 'this last voice wins' model which is very difficult if you are a busy professional," DuPont said.

Google wants to rank entries by popularity to encourage competition. For example, the first knol on "Type 1 Diabetes" is by Anne Peters, director of the University of Southern California's Clinical Diabetes Programs. As other writers publish on diabetes, Google plans to rank related pages according to user ratings, reviews and how often people refer to specific pages, DuPont said. Knol focuses on individual authors or groups of authors in contrast to Wikipedia's subject entries, which are updated by users and edited behind the scenes.

Knol does not edit or endorse the information and visitors will not be able to edit or contribute to a knol unless they have the author's permission. Readers will be able to notify Google if they find any content objectionable. Knol is a hybrid of the individual, often opinionated entries found in blogs and the collective editing relied on by Wikipedia and other wiki sites. The service uses what it calls "moderated collaboration" in which any reader of a specific topic page can make suggested edits to the author or authors, who retain control over whether to accept, reject or modify changes before they are published.

In its early stages, Knol remains a far cry from Wikipedia, www.wikipedia.org, which boasts 7 million collectively edited articles in 200 languages. Google signed a deal with Conde Nast's New Yorker, giving Knol authors the rights to use one of the magazine's famous cartoons in each Knol posting. Google will allow Knol writers to run ads on their entries and will share income with them.

DuPont said that rather than competing with Wikipedia, Knol may end up serving as a primary source of authoritative information for use with Wikipedia articles. "Knols will fill gaps on what we have on the Web today. That is what we hope," DuPont said. Mr. Dupont dismissed speculation that Knol was designed as a Wikipedia killer: "Google is very happy with Wikipedia being so successful. Anyone who tries to kill them would hurt us."

For now, Knol has only a few hundred articles, compared to the nearly 2.5 million in Wikipedia’s English language version. And for now, the best place to follow the debate on whether or not Knol is a Wikipedia killer is on the Knol entry on, where else, Wikipedia.

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Photos courtesy of lifehacker.com.au, Wikipedia and BetaNews

Original Source: Reuters and NY Times

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Researchers at MIT have created a new way to harness the sun's energy - by turning windows in big buildings into solar panels. The new technology, dubbed solar concentrators, harvests light over a wide area such as a window pane and then concentrates or gathers it at the window's edges, said Marc Baldo, a professor at MIT and head of the effort. Three members of the research team, which is publishing its findings in Friday's edition of Science, are in the process of incorporating a startup called Covalent Solar to develop the technology. The team has spent two years identifying organic dyes, painted onto glass or plastic, that can effectively concentrate the sun’s light onto solar cells, enabling them to produce more electricity from fewer cells.

The dyes basically reflect the light (technically, it’s actually absorbed and then sent back out), so that some of it is trapped inside the plane of glass, said Jon Mapel, a member of the research team. With the help of a scientific principal called "internal refraction," which is the same principal that keeps light trapped in optical fibers, the light bounces to the edges of the glass, which have been equipped with strips of solar cells that convert it into electricity.

Baldo added that the technology also could be used to soup up more traditional solar panels, increasing their efficiency by 50 per cent. Solar panels are semiconductors (often found on rooftops) that transform sunlight into electricity. "The sun is an inexhaustible source of clean power. The major impediment to widely deployed solar-power systems has been cost," Baldo told Computerworld. "If you have a big building, you should be able to generate 50 to 60 watts per square meter. The thing with windows is you need a large area of windows. It makes a lot of sense with tall buildings or really big buildings."

With companies looking to go green and cut down on the amount of money they're spending on energy, solar power is gaining attention. And this advancement could help major buildings with lots of windows generate some of their own electricity. Instead of covering a roof with expensive solar panels, the new solar cells only need to be around the edges of a flat glass panel. The concentrated light increases the electrical power obtained from each solar cell by a factor of more than 40, noted Baldo.

Taking technology from the lab to the market can be a daunting task, and Covalent still has many challenges to work out. According to the research the team is publishing in Science, the technology only increased a thin-film panels’ efficiency by 20 percent in tests. And without being paired with a panel, the coated glass only converted 6.8 percent of the light that hit the surface of the concentrator. Another problem is that one of the dyes used in the study has demonstrated a life span of about 10 years. Come rain, snow or unrelenting heat, a solar system has to be able to handle all that nature can throw at it – at least for as long as the warranty lasts. Most of today’s solar panels come with 20- to 25-year warranties. So one of Covalent’s challenges will be to identify dyes that have longer lifespans and can still boost efficiency. Another challenge will be to demonstrate that the technology can live up to the solar industry's expectations, Mapel said, and that means figuring out more mundane things like the proper encapsulation and packaging of their technology.

While the work is being touted as a way to turn windows into solar power generators, Baldo said that traditional solar panels on rooftops still provide the most energy. Using the solar concentrators in window panes is a less expensive alternative. Because the system is relatively simple to manufacture, MIT reports that it could be implemented within three years.

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Photos courtesy of Donna Coveney/MIT and eFluxMedia

Original Source: ComputerWorld and Greentech Media

Related articles: MIT opens new 'window' on solar energy (with video) and Fact Sheet: MIT's solar concentrators

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The announcement by NASA of the discovery of water ice on Mars by its Phoenix Lander probe made big news everywhere. The discovery involved the observation of water ice sublimating into the air - that is, the water went from solid to vapor state without reaching the liquid stage. The Martian atmosphere has perfect conditions for sublimation - extremely thin, dry and cold. How cold? Well, you can check the Live Martian Weather Report, with data from a station on board the Phoenix Lander.

What more do we know about Mars' atmosphere? It's hundreds of times thinner than Earth's atmosphere and is made of 95% carbon dioxide, 3% nitrogen, 1.6% argon, and contains traces of oxygen, water, and methane. We also know, from observations that it can support dust storms, dust devils, clouds and gusty winds. With an amazing number of six current live probes exploring Mars (two rovers, a lander, and three orbiters), there are many thousands of images available. Only a few, however show atmospheric phenomena. Presented here are some of the best images of Martian atmosphere (and beyond) in action.

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These and more photos courtesy of ESA, NASA, JPL (see original source: Boston Globe)

Related article: Can the Martian arctic support extreme life?