Scientists who study ideas to engineer the climate to mitigate global warming say we should be ready to deploy an armada of instrumentation when Earth has its next major volcanic eruption.
Data gathered in the high atmosphere would be invaluable in determining whether so-called “geoengineering” solutions had any merit at all. It would have to be an event on the scale of Mount Pinatubo in 1991. That eruption cooled global temperatures for a couple of years. It did so by pumping 20 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide high into the sky above the Philippines.
The resulting droplets of sulphuric acid that formed on contact with moisture reflected incoming sunlight back out into space, preventing that radiation from warming the surface. Some have suggested humanity could mimic this same effect by deliberately seeding the stratosphere with sulphur.
But Prof Alan Robock from Rutgers University said we had no real knowledge currently of how such a strategy would play out.
That is why he wants to see a co-ordinated investigation of the next big volcanic eruption to gather additional data.
“We’d like to be able to see how this sulphur dioxide cloud evolves from gas into particles and how the particles grow. If the particles are too big then they’ll fall out much more rapidly and you’d have to replenish them much more rapidly, if you’re interested in doing geoengineering. And so we’d like to understand the processes in the formation of these droplets,” he told BBC News.
Prof Robock was speaking in San Jose at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
He and other experts were discussing the US National Research Council report published this week on geoengineering.
The committee members found there was presently insufficient insight into the likely consequences of climate intervention techniques to justify their use.
A senior researcher at the Large Hadron Collider says a new particle could be detected this year that is even more exciting than the Higgs boson.
The accelerator is due to come back online in March after an upgrade that has given it a big boost in energy.
This could force the first so-called supersymmetric particle to appear in the machine, with the most likely candidate being the gluino.
Its detection would give scientists direct pointers to “dark matter”.
And that would be a big opening into some of the remaining mysteries of the universe.
“It could be as early as this year. Summer may be a bit hard but late summer maybe, if we’re really lucky,” said Prof Beate Heinemann, who is a spokeswoman for the Atlas experiment, one of the big particle detectors at the LHC.
“We hope that we’re just now at this threshold that we’re finding another world, like antimatter for instance. We found antimatter in the beginning of the last century. Maybe we’ll find now supersymmetric matter.”
The University of California at Berkeley researcher made her comments at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
I find Dark Matter very interesting, and the more we can find out about it the more exciting it becomes.
Engineers in the UK have found that limpets’ teeth consist of the strongest biological material ever tested.Limpets use a tongue bristling with tiny teeth to scrape food off rocks and into their mouths, often swallowing particles of rock in the process.
The teeth are made of a mineral-protein composite, which the researchers tested in tiny fragments in the laboratory.They found it was stronger than spider silk, as well as all but the very strongest of man-made materials.
The findings, published in the Royal Society’s journal Interface, suggest that the secret to the material’s strength is the thinness of its tightly packed mineral fibres - a discovery that could help improve the man-made composites used to build aircraft, cars and boats, as well as dental fillings.
You were not. Much of the ‘natural’ SUSY theories have already been ruled out. Essentially, MSSM - the minimally supersymmetric model - is all but dead. But SUSY as a principle is still around.
It makes sense to look for signs of supersymmetry; I mean, why not look, right? We’ve found weirder things. But I’d put money on SUSY being a dead-end. Every time we think we’ve got nature figured out, we find out she’s got more up her sleeve than we thought.
An excellent article. I have a bio background but even to someone without it seems that it would be quite readable for such a deep topic. Very well written. Also, had no idea about CRISPRs (sadly, bio is definitely “background” and I don’t keep up well). That sounds quite possibly game-changing - and an ethical tar pit :)
Yeah, I find biology endlessly fascinating even though I am frightfully ignorant of it. I know the basics, but that people have been able to discover and use these marvelous systems is quite an achievement that I am just frankly in awe of. Partially because of our ability to take a biological system and manipulate it, and partially because it’s absolutely amazing to see what evolution has come up with to solve problems that we are only beginning to understand.
But this is just cool. Lamarckian genetic evolution? Didn’t see that one coming. Utilizing DNA as a storage mechanism for a quasi-immune response? Badass.
Don’t understand at all how geneticists can use these very precise ‘scissors’ to do anything but cut (the details of how they put new genes in and reseal the DNA are lacking here) but that’s not a fault of the article or the research. Clearly it’s working.
Black rats may not have been to blame for numerous outbreaks of the bubonic plague across Europe, a study suggests.
Scientists believe repeat epidemics of the Black Death, which arrived in Europe in the mid-14th Century, instead trace back to gerbils from Asia.
Prof Nils Christian Stenseth, from the University of Oslo, said: “If we’re right, we’ll have to rewrite that part of history.”
The study is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Black Death, which originated in Asia, arrived in Europe in 1347 and caused one of the deadliest outbreaks in human history.
Over the next 400 years, epidemics broke out again and again, killing millions of people.
It had been thought that black rats were responsible for allowing the plague to establish in Europe, with new outbreaks occurring when fleas jumped from infected rodents to humans.
Haven’t read the article yet, nor have I used CRISPR technology yet, but a quick Google shows you transfect your target cells with DNA having ends homologous to the DNA flanking the region CRISPR is targeting. You can then simply rely on the host cell’s endogenous repair to “put in the new gene and reseal the DNA.” Alternatively, it looks like you also can use CRISPR to silence genes of interest by simply not adding DNA and the hosts repair process will mess up the genes reading frame. The link above has a pretty simple cartoon of the process.
I’ve heard a lot about CRISPR, but haven’t read up on it yet. This article sounds like a good place to start.
I’ve done a little work a system that have had CRISPR applied. This was a patient with ALS that we identified using RNAseq and stem cells, then did genome editing to correct the mutation and recover the wildtype phenotype. Most of my work was to identify/validate if the genome editing in question actually occurred where it was targeted. It was a few week long puzzle (for me, I’m only tangentially related to a pretty cool project) to start with RNASeq data for the individual and work back what had actually change.
I don’t think people outside of the labs talk much about how editing doesn’t really always occur with pinpoint accuracy where you expect, and sometimes other things occur like jamming random stretches of DNA in 20kb away from where you’d originally targeted your changes. So this, along with the fact that we don’t really understand the genetics of most traits well enough to go and goof with things makes me think genome editing isn’t going to be something you cook up to order anytime soon. The fact is that many traits that seem simple like height are effected by hundreds to thousands of genes (“polygenic”), so you can’t just go and change one gene slightly and see a huge swing in phenotype.
Good points espressojim and that does sound like a pretty cool project. Do you know how long a sequence CRISPR uses for homology? That would be the first source of error I’d think of with any editing system. Thankfully, I do most of my work in plasmids, so I don’t have to worry as much and verification is simple.
Gene editing would be poorly suited for many phenotypes, but it should work pretty well for the simpler SNP-associated diseases. Were you tracking Ubiquilin2 in your study? I think epigenetics is going to be the field where we might finally discover mechanisms to shift gene expression enough to begin to control more complex phenotypes.
I haven’t read the CRISPR article, so I’m curious to read about the Lamarckian genetics, but I’m always amazed too read how much the latest epigenetic study sounds like acquired, inheritable traits.
‘Prehistoric caiman’s bite ‘twice as strong’ as T-Rex’s’:
A prehistoric caiman that lived in the Amazon region about eight million years ago had a bite twice as powerful as that of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, Brazilian scientists say.
A team of Brazilian paleontologists calculated the strength of a bite by the Purussaurus brasiliensis, a reptile that lived in the Late Miocene period. They said it could exert a pressure up to 11.5 tonnes. That is 20 times the strength of a white shark’s bite.
Tito Aureliano, one of the co-authors of the study, said the animal’s head was better structured for biting than that of the T-Rex. The Purussaurus’s stout and robust skull with conical teeth were made for gripping large prey.
The findings by the team drawn from a number of research and academic institutions were published in the online Plos One journal.
Purussaurus brasiliensis could reach a length of more than 12.5m (41ft), longer than a London bus, and was an unrivalled predator in its wetland habitat, the researchers said.
Ten million men suffer from color blindness. KPIX 5 went inside the Berkeley lab where the Enchroma CX glasses are made.
“The glasses work by selectively removing certain wavelengths between the red and green cones that allow them to be in essence pushed apart again,” said Don McPherson, EnChroma’s VP of products.
Correcting color blindness wasn’t McPherson’s original experiment. “This happened almost by mistake,” he recalled.
I’m a not-bench guy, so I didn’t do any of the design - I’m purely informatics and analysis for new systems, as I realized many years ago I was 100% trash on the bench. My worry about doing genome editing for many traits is that single gene effects have low penetrate and there are tons of them, so it’s hard to nudge the system. That doesn’t even get into systems biology, where you may have compensation in other parts of the pathways.
My takeaway is that it’s cool and interesting and sometimes we dig out enough mechanism to help design new small molecules/compounds that might be therapeutic, but we’re so far away from understanding such complex systems that I’m not confident we’ll be able to do this in the next 30 years. It’s always hard to say though, because there are always transformative technologies coming out that can completely change the research landscape - like CRISPR
I look at it and am awestruck. It is a marvel of human invention. And to me, at least, beyond comprehending. A work of art as well as science and engineering.
