Sun goes quiet again but proton events and heightened risk of earthquake and volcanic activity continues

June 14, 2011

After picking up somewhat in April, the sun has quietened again in May.

Sunspots:

Sunspot numbers

 Radio Flux:

10.7 Radio flux

And,

Astronomers will unveil a “major result” on Tuesday (June 14) regarding the sun’s 11-year sunspot cycle.

The announcement will be made at a solar physics conference in New Mexico, according to an alert released today (June 10) by the American Astronomical Society. The discussion will begin at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT).

In the meantime, 

solar flares and proton events continue signifying a period of heightened volcanic and earthquake activity ——

Piers Corbyn predicts,

 M6+ Earthquakes Indonesia and New Zealand confirm WeatherAction 13-15th June quake risk trial warning.

Two major Earthquakes 13 June M6.0 New Zealand (precede by an M5.5) andM6.4 Molucca Sea Indonesia confirm WeatherAction’s warning issued 22 May for 13-15 June as a period of increased earthquake risk. SEE:

http://www.mauritiushot.com/christchurch-earthquake-13-june/ Two quakes hit Christchurch NZ. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/quakes_big.php

“This 13-15th period”, said Piers Corbyn of WeatherAction.com, “is at the ‘q’ (lesser) level of our now two level forecasts of increased Earthquake risk (trial) around the world compared with other times before and after.  In the upper, ‘Q’, level we expect the biggest increases in seismic activity which also includes notable volcanic eruptions. The last Q period May 31- Jun5th was dramatically marked by the new eruption of the Chile earthquake chain on June 4th as well as associated very extreme weather events”. See http://bit.ly/lFXtsu

The next increased Quake risk period 16-19 June – at the larger, Q, level – follows straight after this one.

 

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Posted in Geosciences, Solar science, Volcanos | 1 Comment »

Climate change teaching to get back to science but High Priest Bob Ward wants the brainwashing to continue

June 13, 2011

The phenomenon of climate change will someday get back to science and leave the alarmist dogma behind. But we can expect that any moves in this direction will be resisted bitterly by the high priests of global warming and the carbon trading cabal.

The Guardian reports:

Climate change should be excluded from curriculum

Climate change should not be included in the national curriculum, the government adviser in charge of overhauling the school syllabus in England has said. 

Tim Oates, whose wide-ranging review of the curriculum for five- to 16-year-olds will be published later this year, said it should be up to schoolsto decide whether – and how – to teach climate change, and other topics about the effect scientific processes have on our lives. 

In an interview with the Guardian, Oates called for the national curriculum “to get back to the science in science”. “We have believed that we need to keep the national curriculum up to date with topical issues, but oxidation and gravity don’t date,” he said. “We are not taking it back 100 years; we are taking it back to the core stuff. The curriculum has become narrowly instrumentalist.”

But this is The Guardian and it must have been painful to report such a radical step!! Needless to say they provide ample space for global warming High Priest Bob Ward to voice his objections:

But Bob Ward, policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, warned that Oates’ ideas might not be in pupils’ best interests and could make science less interesting for children.

“An emphasis on climate change in the curriculum connects the core scientific concepts to topical issues,” he said. “Certain politicians feel that they don’t like the concept of climate change. I hope this isn’t a sign of a political agenda being exercised.”

He said leaving climate change out of the national curriculum might encourage a teacher who was a climate change sceptic to abandon teaching the subject to their pupils. “This would not be in the best interests of pupils. It would be like a creationist teacher not teaching about evolution. Climate change is about science. If you remove the context of scientific concepts, you make it less interesting to children.”

But perhaps Bob Ward needs to be reminded that climate change has been happening for ever and will continue without caring very much about what our science purports to understand – or fails to understand. There is little science left in present day “climate science” – which has degenerated to be a dogma with the “consensus scientists” being little more than an advocacy group – and any return to science regarding the climate is welcome and long overdue.

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Two years of self-imposed exile for zu Guttenberg

June 13, 2011

Governments no longer send people into exile but those out of favour often choose self-imposed exile to remove themselves from the public consciousness and wait for better days.

zu Guttenberg needs to purge himself after his plagiarism escapades were found out and seems to have chosen to go this route. A self-imposed exile in London or Washington for about 2 years. But for the “cut and paste” generation his sins are not so heinous – even in academic circles. I consider it unfortunate but it is a reality that the originality that was once considered necessary for any PhD work – in any country and especially in the non-quantitative disciplines – continues to be diluted. Even in the quantitative sciences, the pressure on producing publications has led to many labs with PhD students becoming paper factories. The students go along because the number of their publications is their entry into the academic world.

My guess is that he will be back in German politics in about 5 years. Der Spiegel reports:

After months of hiding from the spotlight, Germany’s fallen former defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg is ready for his next big move — abroad. The conservative is preparing to leave the country and rethink his career following the plagiarism allegations that stalled his promising political trajectory. 

Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has reason to be cautious. State prosecutors are still investigating more than 100 claims connected to allegations that he plagiarized large chunks of his doctoral dissertation. Once Germany’s most popular and promising politician, the scandal forced the member of the Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Union to step down from his post as defense minister on March 1. His alma mater, the University of Bayreuth, later stripped him of his doctoral title, after a damning review of his work found that he had deliberately used text from various sources, including the academic service of the Bundestag where he was an MP at the time, without attributing it. 

Guttenberg has called the plan to leave Germany for at least two years a “sabbatical” in conversations with and emails to friends. He has also reportedly refused to rule out a return to politics at a later date.

Guttenberg and his family are reportedly planning a fresh start abroad after his plagiarism scandal.

Exile or a sabbatical for zu Googleberg: image Der Spiegel

…..

Moving to America in times of difficulty has become an informal tradition for German politicians. Current co-chair of the environmentalist Greens, Cem Özdemir, took a job at a Washington think tank after his personal use of frequent flyer miles earned on the job scandalized German newspapers. He later made a successful comeback.  

Guttenberg, who resigned after just 16 months as defence minister, could be attempting a similar approach. Before the plagiarism scandal many expected the suave aristocrat to make it all the way to the chancellery.

But Guttenberg doesn’t plan to leave too quietly. Before his departure he’s likely to give a lengthy interview about the plagiarism affair, sources told SPIEGEL.

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Posted in Fraud, Germany, Politics | 2 Comments »

The ultimate element anagram

June 11, 2011

The periodic table of elements – first put together by Mendeleev in 1869 –  sometimes seems to have almost mystical properties

Mendeleev's 1869 periodic table; note that his arrangement presents the periods vertically, and the groups horizontally: wikipedia

From Slate

But for my money, the all-time greatest wordplay related to the periodic table is this “doubly true” anagram, which won Mike Keith the special category prize in May 1999 at Anagrammy.com. The initial anagram equates thirty elements on the periodic table with 30 other elements:

hydrogen + zirconium + tin + oxygen + rhenium + platinum + tellurium + terbium + nobelium + chromium + iron + cobalt + carbon + aluminum + ruthenium + silicon + ytterbium + hafnium + sodium + selenium + cerium + manganese + osmium + uranium + nickel + praseodymium + erbium + vanadium + thallium + plutonium

=

nitrogen + zinc + rhodium + helium + argon + neptunium + beryllium + bromine + lutetium + boron + calcium + thorium + niobium + lanthanum + mercury + fluorine + bismuth + actinium + silver + cesium + neodymium + magnesium + xenon + samarium + scandium + europium + berkelium + palladium + antimony + thulium

That’s more than half the periodic table—pretty amazing, especially since he used the elements with Xs and Zs. The kicker is that if you replace each element with its number on the periodic table, the anagram still balances:

1 + 40 + 50 + 8 + 75 + 78 + 52 + 65 + 102 + 24 + 26 + 27 + 6 + 13 + 44 + 14 + 70 + 72 + 11 + 34 + 58 + 25 + 76 + 92 + 28 + 59 + 68 + 23 + 81 + 94

=

7 + 30 + 45 + 2 + 18 + 93 + 4 + 35 + 71 + 5 + 20 + 90 + 41 + 57 + 80 + 9 + 83 + 89 + 47 + 55 + 60 + 12 + 54 + 62 + 21 + 63 + 97 + 46 + 51 + 69

= 1416

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Dirty Football: Another corruption trail from Singapore to Finland

June 11, 2011

Dirty football

The corruption that is endemic at the highest levels with the FIFA administrators  is also evident at lower levels and with players involved in match fixing and the betting industry. The BBC reports:

Finnish football has been rocked by a match-fixing scandal which has implications across the world. Nine former members of one team and a Singapore national accused of organising the scams have been put on trial.

Meanwhile, a criminal investigation has begun into another club suspected of money-laundering. Betting syndicates have been said to make as much as $1.5m (£0.9m) from fixed games. The Finnish League, which began its new season in May, usually commands a low profile in the global game.

But events over the past few months have brought it to the attention of football’s world governing body, and its fight against corruption. Tampere, Finland’s former champions, have been suspended. The club received $435,000 from a Singapore company, but officials could not explain why they had been given such a large sum. Money-laundering is suspected.

Finnish police have said the case is linked to the trial of seven Zambians and two Georgians who used to play for a different club in the north of the country. They are accused of accepting bribes worth more than $750,000 to affect the outcome of matches.

In the same trial Wilson Raj Perumal, a Singaporean, is charged with arranging the payments. Fifa also want to speak to Mr Perumal about international friendly matches involving Asian and African teams that are suspected of being fixed.

Last month, two Zambian brothers who played for another Finnish side were convicted of taking bribes from Mr Perumal. The officer leading the investigation in Finland said there was serious speculation this was only the tip of the iceberg.

Meanwhile further details about the FIFA shenanigans continues. From The Guardian:

Another Caribbean football association has come forward to allege receiving $40,000 (£24,440) in cash at the meeting arranged by Fifa‘s presidential challenger Mohamed bin Hammam and one of its vice-presidents Jack Warner at the heart of the bribery scandal that has rocked the world football governing body.

Blatter: FIFA Corruption supervisor

The president of the Surinam FA has now claimed it received the cash in $100 bills in a brown paper envelope on arrival in Trinidad for the meeting with Bin Hammam on 10 May. …. 

The new evidence from Surinam appears to back up the version of events outlined by other CFU members in the evidence file compiled by the US lawyer John Collins at the behest of the Fifa executive committee member and Concacaf general secretary Chuck Blazer.

The civil war within Concacaf further intensified as Fifa imposed a worldwide ban on Lisle Austin, who claimed to be acting president of the federation in the wake of the suspension of Warner and attempted to fire Blazer.

The whistleblowers were led by the Bahamas FA president Anton Sealey and vice-president Fred Lunn, whose claims were backed by statements from the Bermuda, Cayman Islands and Turks and Caicos Islands FAs. According to Lunn’s affidavit, he was given $40,000 in cash and after photographing the notes he returned the money and set in train the bribery investigation.

A split has formed in the CFU between those who have backed the claims in the evidence file, which also includes text messages and email traffic, and those who insist no inducements were offered.

 

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Tokyo Electric close to insolvency

June 10, 2011

NYT: On Thursday, shares in Tokyo Electric again fell to a record low, at one point slumping to 148 yen ($1.85), down 93 percent from prequake levels. Shares finished at 192 yen ($2.40), down 4 percent from the previous day, and the company already had a 1.25 trillion yen loss in the year ending March 31, the largest annual loss for a nonfinancial institution in Japanese history.

Current Stock Chart Performance for TOKYO ELECTRIC POWER CO INC (9501)

http://investing.businessweek.com

The physical damage from the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has been so widespread that even conservative estimates of compensation claims amount to tens of billions of dollars — a burden that could render Japan’s largest utility insolvent….

….

And banks were so certain of this that they agreed, in early April, to lend almost 2 trillion yen ($25 billion) to the struggling utility company. In the eyes of the market, Tokyo Electric was too big to fail.

Now, three months later, the market is not so sure.

…. Meanwhile, the head of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Atsushi Saito — who was once the president of a state-sponsored organization that assisted ailing companies, — shocked investors when he suggested in an interview last week with local media that Tokyo Electric should go through court-led restructuring, similar to the path Japan Airlines had taken since declaring bankruptcy last year.

Tokyo Electric is Japan’s biggest corporate bond issuer, representing about 8 percent, or about 5 trillion yen, of the country’s 70 trillion yen corporate bond market. And because many of Japan’s largest banks hold shares in Tokyo Electric, they have already taken a direct hit from the utility’s difficulties.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government owns about 3 percent of Tokyo Electric’s shares, and the city’s finances have been thrown into disarray as share prices plunge and dividends are canceled.

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Ununquadium = Flerovium and Ununhexium = Moscovium?

June 9, 2011

In June last year it was reported that element 114 – with the temporary name ununquadium – had been manufactured in the lab.

Periodic table gets bigger: Element 114 Ununquadium

Now a a joint working party of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) have concluded that elements 114 and 116 have fulfilled criteria for official inclusion in the periodic table.

Discovery of the elements with atomic numbers greater than or equal to 113

doi:10.1351/PAC-REP-10-05-01

Abstract: The IUPAC/IUPAP Joint Working Party (JWP) on the priority of claims to the discovery of new elements 113–116 and 118 has reviewed the relevant literature pertaining to several claims. In accordance with the criteria for the discovery of elements previously established by the 1992 IUPAC/IUPAP Transfermium Working Group (TWG), and reinforced in subsequent IUPAC/IUPAP JWP discussions, it was determined that the Dubna-Livermore collaborations share in the fulfillment of those criteria both for elements Z = 114 and 116. A synopsis of experiments and related efforts is presented.

The discovery of both elements has been credited to a collaborative team based at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, US. The collaborative parties have proposed the name flerovium for 114, after Soviet scientist Georgy Flyorov, and moscovium for 116, after the region in Russia.

In recent years, there have been several claims by laboratories for the discovery of elements at 113, 114, 115, 116 and 118 in the periodic table. The working party concluded that elements 114 and 116 now fulfilled criteria for official inclusion in the table.

Periodic Table

Periodic Table with the Unun series: image BBC

The two new elements are radioactive and only exist for less than a second before decaying into lighter atoms. Element 116 will quickly decay into 114, and 114 transforms into the slightly lighter copernicium as it sheds its alpha particles.

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Skin cells made to behave like nerve cells without the use of stem cells

June 7, 2011

A new paper by researchers at Lund University in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America describes how they have managed to develop nerve cells from human skin cells without using stem cells – a development described as an ethical and medical breakthrough.

Direct conversion of human fibroblasts to dopaminergic neurons

by Ulrich Pfisterer, Agnete Kirkeby, Olof Torper, James Wood, Jenny Nelander, Audrey Dufour, Anders Björklund, Olle Lindvall,Johan Jakobsson, and Malin Parmar

doi:10.1073/pnas.1105135108 PNAS June 6, 2011

Abstract: Recent reports demonstrate that somatic mouse cells can be directly converted to other mature cell types by using combined expression of defined factors. Here we show that the same strategy can be applied to human embryonic and postnatal fibroblasts. By overexpression of the transcription factors Ascl1, Brn2, and Myt1l, human fibroblasts were efficiently converted to functional neurons. We also demonstrate that the converted neurons can be directed toward distinct functional neurotransmitter phenotypes when the appropriate transcriptional cues are provided together with the three conversion factors. By combining expression of the three conversion factors with expression of two genes involved in dopamine neuron generation, Lmx1a and FoxA2, we could direct the phenotype of the converted cells toward dopaminergic neurons. Such subtype-specific induced neurons derived from human somatic cells could be valuable for disease modeling and cell replacement therapy.

The Local reports:

 

 

Swedish team turns skin into nerve cells

Swedish team turns skin into nerve cells

A team of researchers at Lund University in southern Sweden have managed to develop nerve cells from human skin cells without using stem cells – a development described as an ethical and medical breakthrough.

“This fundamentally changes how we look at mature cells and their capacity. Previously a skin cell was thought to always remain a skin cell, but we have shown that it can be any cell,” said Malin Parmar, the Lund University researcher leading the study, to The Local on Tuesday.

The new technique works by reprogramming connective tissue cells, so-called human fibroblasts, directly into nerve cells, opening up a new field with the potential to “take research around cell transplantation to the next level”.

Parmar explained that members of the research team were surprised at how receptive the fibroblasts were for new instructions.

“From the beginning this was mostly an experiment that was fun to try out. But fairly quickly it was shown that the cells were unexpectedly receptive to instructions,” she said.

 

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Posted in Medicine, Science | 1 Comment »

Deforestation? Carbon sequestered in forests is increasing

June 7, 2011

A new paper studying forest area and the density of forests by researchers from the University of Helsinki, the US Forestry Department and Rockefeller University:

A National and International Analysis of Changing Forest Density

by Aapo Rautiainen, Iddo Wernick, Paul E. Waggoner,Jesse H. Ausubel, Pekka E. Kauppi

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0019577  pdf

Carbon mass by region 1990–2010.

Annual change in forest area a, carbon density d′, and carbon mass q by region (a) 1990–2000 (b) 2000–2010.

The density of forests and woodland across much of the world is actually increasing

In countries from Finland to Malaysia, the thickening has taken place so quickly that it has reversed the carbon losses caused by deforestation between 1990 and 2010. In Britain, forest density has increased by 10.8 per cent from 2000 to 2010 and by 6.6 per cent across the whole of Europe. Even South America and Africa, which have suffered deforestation because of logging and farming, have recorded increases in forest density of 0.8 per cent and 1.1 per cent respectively. The research, carried out by teams from the University of Helsinki and New York’s Rockefeller University, shows that forests are thickening in 45 of 68 countries, which together account for 72 per cent of global forests. Traditionally, environmentalists have focused their concern solely on the dwindling extent of forested areas, but the authors believe evidence of denser forests could be crucial in reducing the world’s carbon footprint. Professor Pekka Kauppi of Helsinki University, a co-author of the study, said: ‘People worry about forest area, and that’s quite correct. But if you want to know the carbon budget, it cannot be monitored observing only the changes in area. It is more important to observe this change in forest density.’  Aapo Rautiainen, lead author of the report, also based at Helsinki University, said: ‘The reversal occurred in Europe much earlier, then a little bit later in North America, and it has now spread to certain parts of Asia. So that is a positive sign.’  In China, an ambitious reforestation programme has added three million hectares to the country’s forests every year over the past decade, but green campaigners believe this is predominantly composed of one species – eucalyptus. 

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Posted in Agriculture, Alarmism, Environment, Science | 1 Comment »

Royal Wedding Indian Style

June 6, 2011

Where did they find all the very agile lookalikes? Impressive and amusing.

 

 

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