n2doc

n2doc's Journal

October 15, 2012

Dean aghast at Vegas bird beheading

Henry K. Lee
Published 1:31 p.m., Monday, October 15, 2012

(10-15) 13:29 PDT BERKELEY -- The dean of UC Berkeley's law school said Monday that he was "extremely troubled" by the arrest of two law students who allegedly beheaded an exotic bird in Las Vegas.

Christopher Edley Jr., the head of UC Berkeley School of Law, said he was concerned about "the students' actions off campus, but it's up to the Nevada legal system to examine the facts and rule in this case. It's premature to speculate about any possible consequences. The justice system must run its course."

Eric Cuellar, 24, and Justin Teixeira, 24, appeared in a Clark County court on Monday morning, but have not been charged. Prosecutors are seeking more information about the incident from police. The two were ordered to return to court on Feb. 11.

The men were seen throwing a dead 14-year-old helmeted guineafowl, talking about how it was killed and "laughing about it" at the Flamingo Hotel about 9:35 a.m. Friday, Las Vegas police said in a statement.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Dean-aghast-at-Vegas-bird-beheading-3950475.php

October 15, 2012

Moonbow and Meteor over Australia’s Wallaman Falls

Night vision under a full Moon at Wallaman Falls in Queensland, Australia. Credit and copyright: Thierry Legault. Used by permission.
Astrophotographer extraordinaire Thierry Legault traveled to Australia for the Transit of Venus this past June, but he didn’t stop with just taking incredible images of the Transit and then head home to France. He’s just published an wonderful collection of night sky images he took from his time in Australia, including this beautifully stunning image of a ‘Moonbow’ over Wallaman Falls, located in between Townsville and Cairns in north Queensland. If you’ve not seen a Moonbow before, you’re probably not alone. Many times, they are only visible in long exposure photographs, as the Moonlight effect is usually too faint for human eyes to discern. But the Moonlight on the water mist from the falls creates a Moonbow.
“The gibbous Moon makes a Moonbow over the falls while a bright meteor crosses the Milky Way,” Thierry wrote to Universe Today, sharing his new images. “Other visitors were sleeping in the camping area, but not me!”

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/97970/thierry-legault-moonbow-and-meteor-over-australias-wallaman-falls/

October 15, 2012

Citizen Planet Hunters Find a Planet in a Four-Star System

A planet has been discovered orbiting in a four-star system — and no, that doesn’t mean the accommodations and conditions are excellent. It literally means four stars, where a planet is orbiting a binary star system that in turn is orbited by a second distant pair of stars. This is the first system like this that has ever been found, and its discovery demonstrates the power of citizen scientists, as it was found by joint effort of amateurs participating on the Planet Hunters website under the guidance of professional astronomers.

This is might be an extremely rare planetary setup, astronomer Meg Schwamb from Yale says, as only six planets are currently known to orbit two stars, and none of these are orbited by other stellar companions. Astronomers are calling the newly found world a ‘circumbinary’ planet.

“Circumbinary planets are the extremes of planet formation,” said Schwamb, Planet Hunters scientist and lead author of a paper about the system presented Oct. 15 at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Reno, Nevada. “The discovery of these systems is forcing us to go back to the drawing board to understand how such planets can assemble and evolve in these dynamically challenging environments.”

The planet is called PH1, for the first confirmed planet identified by the Planet Hunters citizen scientists, but it has the nickname of Tatooine, the planet in Star Wars that orbited two suns.

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/97999/citizen-planet-hunters-find-planet-in-a-four-star-system/

October 15, 2012

Apollo rocks analysis: solar wind made moon water

By Eryn Brown
Los Angeles Times
October 15, 2012, 3:30 a.m.

Analyzing grains of soil collected from three Apollo lunar missions, geochemists have figured out that the hydrogen in trace amounts of water on the moon’s surface probably came from solar wind, the outflow of positively-charged hydrogen from the sun.

For decades, scientists didn't find much hydrogen in the lunar samples that had been returned to Earth, said Yan Liu, a research professor at the University of Tennessee and lead author of the lunar water study, which was published Sunday in Nature Geoscience.

But in 2008, scientists discovered trace amounts of hydrogen in lunar soil, and in 2010 and 2011 more discoveries followed, she said. Excited by those discoveries, scientists took the next step: to try to figure out if that hydrogen was contained in water and where it might have come from.

That’s where Liu's experiment fit in. Her team analyzed the chemical form of the hydrogen, as well as what hydrogen isotopes -- different versions of the element -- were present in the samples. They found that the hydrogen in the rocks was indeed water. They also found that only a relatively small amount of the hydrogen in the water was of the heavier type known as deuterium.

more
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-moon-water-solar-wind-20121015,0,3054828.story

October 15, 2012

Poison-Proofing China

STANFORD – Last January, China’s environmental authorities barely averted the contamination of nearly three million people’s drinking water after a mining company dumped cadmium – a toxic heavy metal used in the manufacture of batteries, paint, solder, and solar cells – into the Longjiang River. To stop the contamination from spreading, the local fire department had to add significant quantities of dissolved aluminum chloride, which binds to cadmium and settles on the river bottom. The toxic sediment will eventually be dredged. 

Such threats to health and the environment are not uncommon in China. The water in as many as half of the country’s rivers and lakes is unfit for human consumption or contact.

China has also gained a reputation for food and drug contamination (not to mention lead paint in toys and poisonous toothpaste). For example, in 2008, the industrial chemical melamine was added to milk products in order to give falsely high readings of milk protein, causing the death of six infants and sickening 300,000 other people.

Similarly, Mengniu, China’s largest dairy company, announced last December that it had destroyed hazardous products at a plant in the Sichuan province after government safety inspectors discovered the carcinogen aflatoxin in a batch of its milk. (The company denied that any contaminated milk had reached consumers.)

more

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/can-china-prevent-milk--food--and-environmental-contamination-by-henry-i--miller

October 15, 2012