Scientists exploring a deep ocean basin in search of species isolated for millions of years found marine life believed to be previously undiscovered, including a tentacled orange worm and an unusual black jellyfish.
Project leader Dr. Larry Madin said Tuesday that U.S. and Philippine scientists collected about 100 different specimens in a search in the Celebes Sea south of the Philippines.
Madin, of the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said the sea is at the heart of the "coral triangle" bordered by the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia — a region recognized by scientists as having a high degree of biological diversity.
The deepest part of the Celebes Sea is 16,500 feet. The team was able to explore to a depth of about 9,100 feet using a remotely operated camera.
"This is probably the center where many of the species evolved and spread to other parts of the ocean, so it's going back to the source in many ways," Madin told a group of journalists, government officials, students and U.S. Ambassador Kristie Kenney and her staff.
The project involved the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and National Geographic Magazine in cooperation with the Philippine government, which also provided the exploration ship.
The expedition was made up of more than two dozen scientists and a group from National Geographic, including Emory Kristof, the underwater photographer who was part of the team that found the wreckage of the Titanic in 1985.
The group returned to Manila on Tuesday after spending about two weeks in the Celebes Sea off Tawi-Tawi, the Philippines southernmost provincial archipelago nearly 700 miles south of Manila.
Madin said the specimens they collected included several possibly newly discovered species. One was a sea cucumber that is nearly transparent which could swim by bending its elongated body. Another was a black jellyfish found near the sea floor.
The most striking creature found was a spiny orange-colored worm that had 10 tentacles like a squid, Madin said. "We don't know what it is ... it might be something new," he said.
He said it would take "a few more weeks" of research to determine whether the species are newly discovered. He expects to release a report by early next month.
Madin said the Celebes Sea, being surrounded by islands and shallow reefs, is partially isolated now and may have been more isolated millions of years ago, leading scientists to believe that "there may be groups of organisms that have been contained and kept within" the basin since then.
"That makes it an interesting place to go and look to see what we might find," he said.
To Catch the Wind, Bigger is Better
"Small wind doesn't make economic sense," says Paul Gipe, who has written several books and commentaries on wind energy.
The only people who should consider small wind systems (less than 100 kilowatts) are those who have to because they aren't connected to the power company, Gipe said. These "off-grid" consumers made up 90 percent of small wind turbine sales last year in the United States.
Gipe said it's fine if someone on-grid wants to help save the planet by buying a "dinky windmill" for home use, but they should know that it very likely won't last long enough to pay for itself in lowered energy bills.
And they should know to never put one on their roof.
The cost
A typical American home uses about 10,000 kilowatt-hours of energy per year. Depending on the average wind speed, a 10 kilowatt turbine with a 20-foot rotor diameter could supply most of the electricity for a house. Such a system will likely cost around $40,000.
According to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), a person who is living in a windy area (about 10 mph average wind speed or better)—and is eligible for certain government rebates or tax credits—could expect a payback time of 15 years on their small wind system.
Mick Sagrillo, a small-windmill expert for AWEA, agrees with Gipe that some turbines have proven unreliable, but he says that well-built ones can last 20 years or more.
"It's like you are prepaying your electricity bill for two decades," Sagrillo said.
Size matters
But for Gipe it's still too risky. A better investment is a bigger turbine that is more reliable and much better at extracting energy from the wind.
"With wind energy, size does matter," Gipe said.
He's thinking million dollar turbines with 100-foot or more wingspans—out of reach for individual homeowners, but a possibility for businesses and communities. Gipe wishes more Americans would do as some Europeans and pool their resources together to buy large turbines that could supply 500 homes or more.
"Americans are raised on the mythology of individual action," Gipe said. "But not everyone can put a windmill in their backyard."
The cost per kilowatt to build and maintain a large turbine is less than half that for a small turbine. That means large turbines pay for themselves at least twice as fast, and in some cases can even turn a profit for the owners, Gipe said.
The neighbors
Whether in Europe or America, one of the biggest obstacles to owning a piece of the wind is sometimes the neighbors.
"It's often just a matter of 'I don't want to look at it,'" Sagrillo said.
A turbine needs to be at least 30 feet above the tree-line to be effective, which could mean as much as a 100-foot tower. The neighbors might consider that an eyesore or worry that it will fall down.
But falling down "just doesn't happen," Sagrillo said. "Turbines are typically designed for 100-110 mph winds."
Another concern is the noise. Manufacturers typically recommend placing turbines at least 600 feet from any house, but it still might be heard over the background noise. Whether the sound is annoying will depend on subjective experience.
And though putting a turbine on the roof might seem like a short-cut, both Gipe and Sagrillo strongly advise against it. The vibrations could damage the building. But even before that, the wind is too turbulent around a building to get any significant power out.
"There's just no 'fuel' on a roof," Sagrillo said.
Astronomers in Hat Creek, California, were to switch on the first elements of a giant new array of radio telescopes Thursday that they said would greatly extend the investigation of natural and unnatural phenomena in the universe.
When the Allen Telescope Array, as it is known, is complete, it will consist of 350 antennas, each 20 feet, or 6 meters, in diameter. Using the separate antennas as if they were one giant dish, radio astronomers will be able to map vast regions of the sky cheaply and efficiently.
The array will help search for new phenomena like black holes eating each other and so-called dark galaxies without stars, as well as extend the search for extraterrestrial radio signals a thousandfold, to include a million nearby stars over the next two decades.
On Thursday, 42 of the antennas, mass-produced from molds and employing inexpensive telecommunications technology, were to go into operation.
"It's like cutting the ribbon on the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria," said Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the Seti Institute in Mountain View, California, who pointed out that this was the first radio telescope ever designed specifically for the extraterrestrial quest.
The telescope, named for Paul Allen, who provided $25 million in seed money, is a joint project of the Radio Astronomy Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Seti Institute. "If they do find something, they're going to call me up first and say we have a signal," Allen said in an interview, adding, "So far the phone hasn't rung."
Describing himself as "a child of the '50s, the golden age of space exploration and science fiction," Allen, a founder of Microsoft, said he first got interested in supporting the search for extraterrestrial intelligence after a conversation 12 years ago with Carl Sagan, the Cornell University astronomer and exuberant proponent of cosmic wonder.
When the idea later arose to build a telescope array on the cheap, using off-the-shelf satellite dish technology and advanced digital signal processing, Allen was intrigued. "If you know anything about me," he said, "you know I'm a real enthusiast for new unconventional approaches to things."
Telescopes, including radio telescopes, have traditionally been custom-built one-of-a-kind items. The antennas for the Allen array are stamped from a mold. Allen's family foundation put up the money to get the first part of the array built, with other contributions from Nathan Myhrvold, formerly of Microsoft and the chief executive of Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Washington, among others.
Leo Blitz, director of the Radio Astronomy Laboratory, estimated that it would take three years and $41 million more, depending on the price of aluminum, to complete the array. The full array, astronomers say, will be useful not just for science, but also as practice for a truly giant telescope known as the Square Kilometer Array, which would have a combined receiving area of a square kilometer, or 0.4 square miles, and which astronomers hope to build in Australia or South Africa in 10 or 20 years.
Blitz said the main advantage of the Allen array for regular radio astronomy was the ability to obtain images of large swaths of the sky, several times the size of the full moon, in a single pointing. At low frequencies, he said, the full array could map the entire sky in a day and night and do it again the next night. "This has not been possible before," he said.
In its partial form, Blitz said, the array is already almost as fast as larger telescopes, and much cheaper to run.
The speed should make it possible to catch transient events, like radio bursts from colliding black holes, that might last only a few hours, while the mapping ability should enable astronomers to search for lumps of gas without stars, the so-called dark galaxies predicted by the prevailing models of cosmology.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has lived on the kindness of strangers since Congress canceled a NASA-sponsored search using existing radio telescopes in 1993, only a year after it had begun. The Seti Institute, which was to have conducted a search of nearby stars under contract to NASA, raised money from Silicon Valley and revived the search as Project Phoenix, using existing radio telescopes.
Project Phoenix was finished three years ago, having checked some 750 stars for signals, Shostak said. While that might sound like a lot, he said, "it doesn't impress anybody who knows how many stars there are in the galaxy."
There are some 200 billion stars in the galaxy, and a significant fraction of them have planets. Estimates of the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy have ranged from one (or none, if you are particularly discouraged about human affairs) into the millions.
Shostak calculated that the full Allen array would be able to detect a signal from as far as 500 light years that is only a few times more powerful than what can now be sent by the Arecibo radio telescope, a dish 1,000 feet, or 305 meters, in diameter in Puerto Rico that is the world's largest (although it is in danger of being shut down to save money). That translates to about a million stars, which he said was getting into a promising number. Shostak described the expanded search as looking for the needle in the proverbial haystack with a shovel instead of a spoon.
Anyone out there and broadcasting, for whatever wacky alien reason, would also have to be broadcasting right at Earth. But advanced civilizations, Shostak said, would be able to tell there was life on Earth because of the oxygen in our atmosphere. "We've been broadcasting that for 2.5 billion years," he said.
The first thing Shostak and his colleagues plan to do with the newly operational 42-antenna array is to survey a strip across the center of the galaxy. There will be several billion stars in the field of view, but they will be very far away, 10,000 to 50,000 light years, so any signal would have to be huge to be detected. But who is to say that, among galactic civilizations, there are not a rare few with tremendous capabilities?
"I've never begrudged aliens any power in their transmitter," Shostak said.
The daily weather forecast on Saturn's largest moon Titan appears to be a steady drizzle of liquid methane, at least around the bright, exotically named region known as Xanadu, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
But this is hardly the paradise romanticized by the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem "Kubla Kahn."
New images from Hawaii's W.M. Keck Observatory and Chile's Very Large Telescope show nearly global cloud cover at high elevations and a dreary morning drizzle that seems to dissipate around midmorning local time -- which is about three Earth days after sunrise.
Scientists had expected rain in the atmosphere of this planet-sized moon, but these near-infrared images for the first time have revealed a persistent drizzle of methane off the western foothills of Xanadu.
"We expected that perhaps it was raining. It was reasonable that it could be raining. We just didn't know if it was raining right now," said Mate Adamkovics, a University of California, Berkeley researcher whose paper appears in the journal Science.
Titan is larger than the planet Mercury, but much, much colder, with surface temperatures of minus 297 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 183 degrees Celsius) -- cold enough to turn an explosive gas like methane into a liquid form.
It is well known for its hydrocarbon lakes and methane cloud cover. Radar images of Xanadu taken in 2006 showed deep channels that cut through plains and wind around hills.
And now it appears these moisture-laden clouds rain down on Xanadu.
"The question is, is it liquid methane that is sitting in a cloud, or is it falling through the sky," Adamkovics said in a telephone interview.
His hunch is that it is falling, given the massive size of these raindrops, which Adamkovics believes are about 1,000 times bigger than rain on Earth.
"Because there is a bit less gravity and the atmosphere is thicker on Titan, the rain drops and the cloud drops are really big," he said.
Whereas raindrops on Earth are micrometer sized, he said on Titan they appear to be a millimeter or bigger in size.
"The droplet gets so big it can't hold itself together anymore," Adamkovics said.
He and colleagues are now speculating about just what is causing the rain, and whether it follows weather patterns similar to those on Earth.
"The first thing you need is either air being pushed upward or you need the temperature to drop. What we didn't expect is there to be a big temperature drop daytime to nighttime on Titan," he said.
"Since we have seen the rain, we thought maybe there is enough of a temperature drop to cause the rain to start," he said, but right now that is just speculation.
"How it happens is unclear. We just know that it does," he said.
Xanadu, a region about the size of Australia, was first discovered in 1994 by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
Tree Frog Inspires New Easy-Off Stickies
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Image: BARNES RESEARCH GROUP |
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STICK AROUND: A new adhesive takes its cue from the sticky toe pads of tree frogs. CLICK HERE FOR FULL IMAGE |
Unable to beat nature, researchers have joined it. The ripping sound of Velcro echoes the prickly, sweater-grabbing burdock seeds that inspired the childhood wonder material. Gecko feet bristle with millions of branching, self-cleaning fibers called setae, the inspiration for so-called "gecko tape." Even the "glue" that keeps zebra mussels anchored to rocks has been imitated.
Now, inspired by the clingy toes of tree frogs and insects, researchers have created a new adhesive that can become up to 30 times stickier on demand or peel off easily, allowing it to re-adhere. Although weaker than ordinary Scotch tape, researchers say the concept may lead to custom-strength, reusable adhesives that peel off without losing their gluey power.
The secret to the film's ability to grip and release, they say, lies in narrow, oil-filled channels just below the surface, reminiscent of the honeycomb grooves on tree frog toe pads and the feet of bush crickets and other insects. Unlike hairy gecko feet, tree frogs and insects secrete a viscous fluid onto their flat, adhesive pads.
Like speed bumps, the grooves slow the growth of cracks that form when adhesives stretch to their breaking point. Adding fluid diffuses the rupture-causing forces on the grooves through the so-called capillary effect, says materials chemist Animangsu Ghatak of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.
Inspired by the concept, Ghatak and his colleagues carved micro-scale tubes in a layer of the polymer PDMS (polydimethyl siloxane), which sticks very weakly on its own, then filled the channels with silicone oil. They sandwiched the film between two plates and pulled the top plate up to test the stickiness. The best results—a 3,000 percent gluey boost—came from tubes 710 microns wide (nearly ten times thicker than a human) filled with moderately viscous oil, the researchers report in Science.
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| Image: BARNES RESEARCH GROUP | |
| HONEYCOMB GROOVES in the toe pad of a tree frog, visible under the electron microscope, slow the formation of adhesion-busting cracks. CLICK HERE FOR FULL IMAGE |
"The results are really exciting," says Phillip Messersmith, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern University. "To my knowledge, this is the first study describing the use of subsurface features—the air- or silicone-filled channels—to enhance adhesion."
The findings also help solve the mystery of why tree frog and insect pads consist of a stiff outer layer over a fluid-filled one, says biologist Jon Barnes of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, who studies tree frog adherence.
The leading bioinspired adhesive, however, is probably still gecko tape, which has proved its sticking power: Carnegie Mellon University researchers designed a robot that climbed straight up a smooth wall on strips of custom tape. And Messersmith's group unveiled a reusable adhesive in July that combined geckolike hairs with an imitation zebra mussel glue. Voila: the resulting "geckel" tape stuck to wet surfaces as well as dry ones.
Messersmith says the catch with the tree frog adhesive is that the parallel channels work in only one direction, and it could be pricey to manufacture tape with a network of fluid-filled tubes.
So what are the prospects of a real-life, wall-scaling Spider-Man? Messersmith does not rule it out, but notes it is still a long way off. Without self-cleaning, gecko tape would quickly get gunked up, and reusability remains a rare commodity among bioinspired adhesives. "It's remarkable really," he says, "since the essence of tree frog and gecko adhesion is that it is temporary and reversible."
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