Satellite will Track CO2

Thirty billion tons of carbon dioxide is found in the air from burning fossil fuel every year. Half remain in the air while the other half disappears. The NANA satellite scheduled to be launched on Tuesday will help to understand the goings of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is the main heat-trapping gas behind the warming of the planet.
The new data could help improve climate models and the understanding of carbon sinks what are oceans that absorb. Some year’s carbon dioxide stays in the air which indicates some of the sinks that absorb some of the carbon dioxide. There are variations each year so some years it will stay in the air and some years it will disappear. “Something out there is changing dramatically,” said David Crisp, a scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who is the principal investigator of the mission. Before the beginning of the Industrial revolution the CO2 levels were about 280 parts per million. The level is 387 parts per million today and is projected to rise sharply in the coming decades. Scientists have a good estimate about how much CO2 is being released because of the burning of fossil fuels but other human impacts like clearing forest and harvesting crops also affects CO2 but scientists yet know how.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/science/earth/23carbon.html?_r=1&ref=science

Theory and Experiment Meet, and a New Form of Boron Is Found

Artem R. Oganov, a professor of geosciences at Stony Brook University, calls “a stream of discoveries and misdiscoveries.” . They have found a form of boron that is nearly as hard as diamond. In 1808, within a week and a half of each other, two research efforts, led by chemists Sir Humphrey Davy in London and Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Louis-Jacques Thénard in Paris, announced that they had isolated boron. They had not. Another great chemist, Henri Moissan, later showed that the two earlier groups had made a compound consisting of 60 percent boron. Moissan also claimed to have isolated boron. He too was wrong, although he did do better: a compound with 90 percent boron.Not until 1909 was a sample of 99 percent pure boron produced.boron comes in multiple forms — as many as 16 have been reported. Alpha boron, is a dark but transparent red. Beta boron is black and looks like coal. Even today, scientists do not definitively know which of these two forms is the stable form. (It is probably beta boron.) The third form is a horrendously complicated structure known as T-192. The fourth form is the newly discovered one.