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February 9th, 2010 Tags: coffee, Tsang Cheung Shing

by Sheril Kirshenbaum in science of kissing | 4 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

January 30th, 2010 6:32 PM Tags: ISS, Space Shuttle

by Phil Plait in NASA | 11 | | >

ScienceInsider reports that the Microsoft founder had provided at least $4.5 million of his own money to be distributed over 3 years for the study of methods that could alter the stratosphere to reflect solar energy, techniques to filter carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere, and brighten ocean clouds [ScienceInsider]. These and other geoengineering techniques have been hotly debated in the scientific world, with some critics arguing that tinkering with Earth’s natural systems could do more harm than good.

Methods that divert some incoming solar energy, like spraying reflective aerosols into the stratosphere or making clouds more reflective, have been deemed potentially effective but also risky; the abrupt halt of a large-scale project would result in sudden, extreme warming. On the other hand, techniques that reduce the amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere are considered less risky, but they’re currently too expensive to implement widely.

Some of Gates’ money has been granted to Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Palo Alto, California and physicist David Keith of the University of Calgary in Canada–two of Gates’ informal energy and climate advisers for many years. They have also advised Gates on dispensing the money, some of which has already been granted to Armand Neukermans, an inventor based in Silicon Valley who is working with colleagues to design spray systems for the marine clouds, and students and scientists working for Keith and Caldeira. Funding has also helped support scientific meetings in geoengineering in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Edinburgh, Scotland, and aeronautics research related to altering the stratosphere [ScienceInsider]. Caldeira clarified that Gates’ money had not funded any field experiments; he also noted that some of the funding goes to more general research on climate change.

Gates’ funding is in line with his recent essay on climate policy in which he called for radical innovations in electricity generation and transportation. “If the goal is to get the transportation and electrical sectors down to zero emissions you clearly need innovation that leads to entirely new approaches to generating power,” Gates wrote. “While it is all well and good to insulate houses and turn off lights, to really solve this problem we need to spend more time on accelerating innovation” [Wired.com].

This is not the first time that Gates has shown an interest in geoengineering research. He is an investor in a Seattle, Washington-area firm called Intellectual Ventures that is investigating techniques to geoengineer the stratosphere. Gates worked with them to apply for a patent in 2008 to sap hurricanes of their strength by mixing warm surface water and with cold, deep ocean water.

While Gates’ $4.5 million contribution to climate change research is significant, it does pale in comparison to his other philanthropic efforts. Endorsing vaccines as the world’s most cost-effective public health measure, Bill and Melinda Gates said Friday that their foundation would more than double its spending on them over the next decade, to at least $10 billion [The New York Times].

Related Content:

80beats: Bill Gates Patents a Device Aimed at Halting Hurricanes

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80beats: Fighting Global Warming: Artificial Trees and Slime-Covered Buildings

80beats: Obama’s Science Adviser Kicks Up a Fuss Over Geoengineering

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Image: iStockphoto

January 29th, 2010 3:42 PM Tags: Bill Gates, climate change, geoengineering, global warming, green technology

by Smriti Rao in Environment, Technology | 6 | | >

Funny, you can barely see Mars in the picture, but it was really obvious by eye. That’s because cameras see things linearly — an object twice as luminous as another will appear twice as bright in a picture — while our eyes see things logarithmically — a mathematical function that lets our eyes see a much larger range of brightness based on multiplication, not addition. It’s actually a bit more complicated than this, but the point is while to the camera the Moon was vastly brighter than Mars (about 30,000x as bright!), to my eye the difference wasn’t nearly as much (only about 10x as bright). This allows our eye to detect faint and bright objects at the same time, which a camera can’t do easily.

You may have read that the Moon looked so bright last night because it was at perigee, the point in its orbit when it’s closest to Earth. Honestly, that makes no difference to the casual observer. While it really was a bit bigger and brighter, the difference over a normal full Moon is pretty small, and you don’t have anything to compare it with. If you could have superimposed a normal full Moon next to the Moon last night you might have seen a difference, but with just the one Moon sitting there you’d never notice.

This reminds me of the time in 1999 when people said the perigee full Moon would be so bright you could drive at night without headlights! Yeah. Bad idea.

But I do hope that some of the hype got people outside and noticing the sky. It’s amazing what you can see, what lovely things await you, if you simply look up.

January 30th, 2010 9:17 AM Tags: Mars, Moon, perigee

by Phil Plait in Astronomy, Cool stuff, Pretty pictures | 14 | | >