Science News Digest - 13 December 2010
In the science news this week, we take a look at the discovery of a (potentially) diamond planet, new theories on glacial melts, the downside of being an alpha male and finally…the science of santa.
Precious planet
A US-British team of researchers have announced the discovery of the first planet with ultra high concentrations of carbon, where the landscapes could be made up of diamonds and graphite.
Using Nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope, they detected thermal radiation from the planet some 1,200 light years away. With the information they gained from this, they calculated the composition of its atmosphere.
Dr Marek Kukula of the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London said to the BBC "It is absolutely astonishing that these scientists are able to start to tease out the details of what planets around other stars are made of."
"The planet is thousands of times fainter than the star it orbits. So the scientists have to perform an amazing feat of precision measurement to extract anything at all. The fact that they are able to tell us something about the composition of this particular planet is quite literally out of this world."
The ability to discern the composition of these exoplanets is a recent addition to astronomy due to the development of more powerful instruments.
The planet, Wasp 12b is a gas giant like Jupiter, and is mostly made from hydrogen gas, but it is the first they have found to contain more carbon than oxygen.
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Melting moments
If all the ice sheets in Greenland melted, global sea levels would rise by 6.5 meters, however, even if the Earth’s climate rose by 8°C it could still take over 1000 years for this to happen.
Yet one factor that has worried climatologists is the potential for glaciers to go into self destruct, where the more they melt, the more water they produce that lubricates the glaciers slide downhill and thus melting it sooner and creating more water…
However Christian Schoof of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who has built a new model of glaciers that simulates how they respond to meltwater has said this positive feedback is "limited", because of the way their internal structure changes to get rid of excess water.
Meltwater carves out channels in the base of the glacier to get rid of excess water, but whenever it passes over a bump in the ground a cavity forms. The cavities hold water and lubricate the glacier for longer aggravating the pace of glacial melt. However Schoof’s model shows that once the meltwater goes past a critical level, it burrows an even larger channel for itself to drain away the excess water and relieve the problem.
"It's a very efficient route for water to be evacuated," Schoof says to New Scientist.
Glaciologist Roderik van de Wal of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who has found no sign of the feared feedback effect.
"The melt has been increasing but glacier velocities have not," he says. "This is a physical explanation."
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Alpha beater
While the status of ‘Alpha male’ is known to have its benefits, one of the lesser known effects of this has been detailed in ScienceNOW this week.
Higher ranking primates are known to have more testosterone, which is also noted to suppress the immune system.
However researchers studying fecal samples from 22 male chimps in Kibale National Park in Uganda also noted that the chimps with higher levels of testosterone also had a higher level of parasites living in their gut, possibly because of the immune-suppressant effect of the hormone.
As ScienceNOW says ‘females may be impressed not only by a male's manliness, but by his ability to withstand the excess onslaught of parasites in his gut.’
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And finally…..
Santa Science
The Telegraph has looked into the science of Santa this week and done a few sums.
For example, assuming Santa has to travel 510,000,000km on Christmas Eve to deliver all of his presents over 32 hours (given the global time zone differences) he would need to travel at about 1,800 miles per second, all night and launch the presents down chimneys with a precision guidance system to save time.
Assuming all 700,000,000 children are receiving this years’ hot toy- ‘Buzz Lightyear’ from Toy Story 3, which have a boxed weight of 1.2kg this would equate to 840,000 tonnes of toys and will require 5,600,000 reindeer to pull.
Given that each reindeer weighs around 272kg (600lb), the whole procession (assuming a weightless sleigh) will have a mass of 2,363,200 tonnes when standing still according to the Telegraph.
Precious planet
A US-British team of researchers have announced the discovery of the first planet with ultra high concentrations of carbon, where the landscapes could be made up of diamonds and graphite.
Using Nasa’s Spitzer Space Telescope, they detected thermal radiation from the planet some 1,200 light years away. With the information they gained from this, they calculated the composition of its atmosphere.
Dr Marek Kukula of the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London said to the BBC "It is absolutely astonishing that these scientists are able to start to tease out the details of what planets around other stars are made of."
"The planet is thousands of times fainter than the star it orbits. So the scientists have to perform an amazing feat of precision measurement to extract anything at all. The fact that they are able to tell us something about the composition of this particular planet is quite literally out of this world."
The ability to discern the composition of these exoplanets is a recent addition to astronomy due to the development of more powerful instruments.
The planet, Wasp 12b is a gas giant like Jupiter, and is mostly made from hydrogen gas, but it is the first they have found to contain more carbon than oxygen.
--------------------
Melting moments
If all the ice sheets in Greenland melted, global sea levels would rise by 6.5 meters, however, even if the Earth’s climate rose by 8°C it could still take over 1000 years for this to happen.
Yet one factor that has worried climatologists is the potential for glaciers to go into self destruct, where the more they melt, the more water they produce that lubricates the glaciers slide downhill and thus melting it sooner and creating more water…
However Christian Schoof of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who has built a new model of glaciers that simulates how they respond to meltwater has said this positive feedback is "limited", because of the way their internal structure changes to get rid of excess water.
Meltwater carves out channels in the base of the glacier to get rid of excess water, but whenever it passes over a bump in the ground a cavity forms. The cavities hold water and lubricate the glacier for longer aggravating the pace of glacial melt. However Schoof’s model shows that once the meltwater goes past a critical level, it burrows an even larger channel for itself to drain away the excess water and relieve the problem.
"It's a very efficient route for water to be evacuated," Schoof says to New Scientist.
Glaciologist Roderik van de Wal of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who has found no sign of the feared feedback effect.
"The melt has been increasing but glacier velocities have not," he says. "This is a physical explanation."
--------------------
Alpha beater
While the status of ‘Alpha male’ is known to have its benefits, one of the lesser known effects of this has been detailed in ScienceNOW this week.
Higher ranking primates are known to have more testosterone, which is also noted to suppress the immune system.
However researchers studying fecal samples from 22 male chimps in Kibale National Park in Uganda also noted that the chimps with higher levels of testosterone also had a higher level of parasites living in their gut, possibly because of the immune-suppressant effect of the hormone.
As ScienceNOW says ‘females may be impressed not only by a male's manliness, but by his ability to withstand the excess onslaught of parasites in his gut.’
--------------------
And finally…..
Santa Science
The Telegraph has looked into the science of Santa this week and done a few sums.
For example, assuming Santa has to travel 510,000,000km on Christmas Eve to deliver all of his presents over 32 hours (given the global time zone differences) he would need to travel at about 1,800 miles per second, all night and launch the presents down chimneys with a precision guidance system to save time.
Assuming all 700,000,000 children are receiving this years’ hot toy- ‘Buzz Lightyear’ from Toy Story 3, which have a boxed weight of 1.2kg this would equate to 840,000 tonnes of toys and will require 5,600,000 reindeer to pull.
Given that each reindeer weighs around 272kg (600lb), the whole procession (assuming a weightless sleigh) will have a mass of 2,363,200 tonnes when standing still according to the Telegraph.
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