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.

Obama Welcomed By Scientists

With a new president comes a new world of science. When Obama said he would “restore science to its rightful place,” he was signaling an end to eight years of stark tension between science and government. Science staff members held parties in the office on this day because it was a start to a new beginning after the tensions of the last eight years. Obama plans to build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together, something that Bush had not done. With expectations so high, and promises of progress in stubborn areas like alternative energy, Obama has a lot of eyes watching him. With a new president, and a new beginning Obama is bound to have great success in renewing the bond between scince and government.

Current Events-Nicole Carpenter

Europe has recently taken little effort to reduce the release of power related carbons into the atmosphere, but by establishing an Emissions Preformance Standards (EPS) in Europe, it would do so in the least costly way. Currently, Europe has not outlawed any systems, like coal fueling of factories, which are very high in pollution. However, enforcing the EPS would ensure Europe to only invest in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and capturing the CO2. If the rules of the ETS were enforced, by 2020, Europe will have cut their green house gas emissions by two-thirds. It would be more cost-effective than ensuring this act later, and the government could make money from selling green gas emission permits rather than giving away. The EPS has great potential to greatly reduce the amount of green house gas emittents in Europe.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090120171459.htm

New studies conducted by NASA may suggest that the moon may have not always been a desolate, frozen wasteland.  A rock, collected on the first trip to the moon 36 years ago has shown a surprising clue that leads to the conclusion of there once being a volcanic and molten surface.  This was concluded when the rock, Troctolite 76535 which is made up of olivine and plagioclase, was found to have a magnetic field.  A magnetic field can indicate either, a large collision creating an extreme amount of force and heat, or  the constant melting and solidifying of iron.  Due to troctolite 76535 being made 300 million years after the moon was made there could have been no cataclysmic collision.  Another point of evidence supporting the thought of a volcanic surface and a magnetic field around the moon is that earthquakes have been occurring periodically on the moon.  This is due to a molten core heating and congealing under the surface, which causes tremors.  The magnetic field generated by the once molten surface and the still molten core lead experts to believe that a magnetic field about a fifteenth as strong as Earth's once existed on the moon.

www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/science/space/20moon.html_?r=&ref=science