Fine Scientist

"Climate forcing due to aerosol changes is a wild card," concluded James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Reto Ruedy, Andrew Lacis, and Valdar Oinas in Global warming in the twenty-first century: An alternative scenario. "Current trends, even the sign of the effect, are uncertain. Unless climate forcings by all aerosols are precisely monitored, it will be difficult to define optimum policies."*

Beauty can't hide! Flower gardens exist in our vast oceans. Fishermen have long noted colored fish and coral reefs in the Gulf of Mexico. The flower gardens banks consist of coral-capped banks or sandstone banks with fire coral and sponge-laden pinnacles and flats. Thirteen red dots in the following map locate such banks so close to the northwestern Gulf shores. These coral reefs are the northernmost in the continental United States. 
 

Sustainability stretches through greener chemistry. Imagine having a choice in designing environmentally friendly materials. This opportunity is presented in "Identifying the Molecular Origin of Global Warming" scheduled for the November 12's ACS Journal of Physical Chemistry. The approach taken by Partha Bera et al. seeks to explain how fundamental properties influence molecular absorption in the atmospheric window. What are the major factors that make some molecules more effective greenhouse gases (GHGs)? 

Global climate reminds us it is one world afterall. NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center released the September temperatures. Separately, the combined global land and ocean surface temperature or the average land surface temperature proves September the second warmest on record, behind 2005. The former was 1.12 degrees F above the last century's average of 59.0 degrees F while the latter 1.75 degrees F above the last century's average of 53.6 degrees F. In addition, the global ocean surface temperature was tied for the fifth warmest on record for September. Most of the world’s land areas experienced higher-than-average temperatures.

A Tale Of Two Cities (by Charles Dickens) was a weekly serial publication at this time 150 years ago. My tale of two feathers is about dinosaurs and modern birds with a twist on feathers.  

Soon the world will learn who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Do you remember Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon of the following announcement? The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2003The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2003 “for discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes”, with one half of the prize toPeter AgreJohns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA“for the discovery of water channels”and one half of the prize toRoderick MacKinnonHoward Hughes Medical Institute, The Rockefeller University, New York, USA“for structural and mechanistic studies of ion channels”. [1] Two Cell Membrane Channels

What is your yardstick for climate change? Really, how do you relate climate response to human CO2 emissions?A new yardstick is proposed by Damon Matthews, a professor in Concordia University’s Department of Geography, Planning and the Environment. With colleagues from Victoria and the U.K., Matthews used a combination of global climate models and historical climate data to derive a simple linear relationship between total cumulative emissions and global temperature change.

James Hollis, Ph.D., is a graduate of the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich. He has taught  mythology and religion, men's issues, and midlife. His books have been translated into Russian, German, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian, Korean, Finnish, and Japanese. "Under Saturn's Shadow - THE WOUNDING AND HEALING OF MEN" is the impetus for my interview.SB: Taking words from your book, I feel empowered to dive into life and struggle for depth and meaning. Dr. Hollis, thanks very much for this interview. Shall we get serious about psyche?

CO2 reduction targets can be met with affordability. An EPRI report released this week concludes affordability requires a "full portfolio" of electricity sector technologies. Diverse generation "could simultaneously address the challenge of growing load demand while meeting carbon constraints and limiting increases in the cost of electricity." 

In Toledo, Ohio on June 26, 1914 -- a star was born. He was named Lyman Strong Spitzer, Jr. for good measure. An asteroid, a space telescope, and a building in the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) bear his name today. His theoretical and applied research contributions shaped three fields of science, namely, interstellar matter, the dynamics of star clusters, and the physics of plasmas.

Summertime, and the livin' is easy, wrote Ira Gershwin and Du Bose Heyward in 1933. The current gasoline prices are not easy on the budget because they are rising again. According to the New York Times of 8 June 2009: "Gas prices have risen 41 days in a row, to a national average of almost $2.62 a gallon. That is a sharp increase from the low of $1.62 a gallon that prevailed at the end of last year."

Fields are alive with the promise of medicine. Consider my list of dozen alkaloids found in nature. They exist in whole plant or its organ(s). Some of these chemical compounds are in minute amounts. For example, vincristine, the cancer chemotherapeutic compound in Catharanthus roseus, occurs at concentrations under 0.0003% on a dry basis. The root of Strychnos nux-vomica contains about 6% strychnine, a pesticide and a former stimulant.[1]