Science under George W. Bush David Baltimore explains why US President George W. Bush has been unkind to science. While enormous amounts of money have gone into defence, funding for health research has decreased by 10%. Scientific findings have been ignored. Scientists have been muzzled. Science has been little mentioned in the current presidential campaign. Science funding in Ireland and the potential and ethics of animal cloning Ireland has a plan to double the number of PhDs. The country is establishing new investigator positions. Incremental growth is planned over the next 5 years. Patrick Cunningham points to Scandinavian countries which have bolstered science and can show the results. Deep-sea corals Deep-sea corals don´t have photosynthetic algae as do tropical corals. They are typically found at depths of between 1,000 and 2,000 metres. They´re found in waters right across the Atlantic, and are related to currents. Off the coast of Ireland, these corals form carbonate mounts often 100m long. They started building up 2 million years ago. They take a variety of food sources include plants and animals. The state of the world´s oceans Despite their vastness, no single spot in the world´s oceans is untouched by human activities. Nearly half the oceans are heavily impacted. Oceans are in trouble. Threats include warming waters and runoff from the land. Industrial fishing has stripped the oceans of large quantities of large fish. Now bottom trawling has been identified as a major threat. Heavy nets are dragged over the floor and stir up the muddy bottom causing plumes of sediment which change the physical and chemical nature of the ocean waters. Atlas of the world´s oceans and human impact Elizabeth Selig has prepared a global atlas of the human effects on the world´s oceans. The maps identify the most heavily affected locations and last remaining untouched areas of the world´s oceans. Mars Rover Phoenix The latest Mars Rover, Phoenix is due to land on the planet on May Sunday May 25th 4.26pm US Pacific time. Celestial machanics allows for precise prediction of when the spacecraft will land. It is thought the surface is like permafrost without vegetation. Solar panels will be deployed for power, and surface samples will be collected and placed in an oven to determine their composition. Engineering's big challenge in the 21st century It is expected energy from solar cells will soon become competitive with energy from fossil fuels. The sun sends 10,000 times the energy we need for our use each day. So there´s plenty of energy. Collecting it and converting it to forms to replace all fossil fuels is the challenge. Ray Kurzweil argues a key thing happens when an industry or technology goes from a pre-information era to a post-information era. The example is the human genome where progress is now exponential. It took 5 years to sequence HIV. SARS was sequenced in 31 days. Now a virus can be sequenced in 1 or 2 days. Power doubles each year. The future of solar engineering is nano-engineered materials which incorporate information technology.

[ Sat, 23 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +1000 ]

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