Blogs / Discoblog

Over the weekend United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that whichever candidate becomes the next U.S. President this coming January needs to start from day one leading the world on confronting global warming. But that’s not enough for some members of Britain’s esteemed Royal Society, who in a collection of papers published this week called for major steps in geoengineering to fight climate change.

Perhaps you’ve heard of some of the wilder ideas for fighting global warming: seeding the ocean with iron to make it grow phytoplankton which will absorb carbon dioxide, or launching a Greenland-sized, Montgomery Burns-inspired deflector shield (or many trillion tiny ones) to block some of the sun’s rays. Cockamamie schemes or not, the Royal Society scientists say that because governments have done so little to curb greenhouse emissions, any possible method to fight global warming should be on the table because doing something is better than doing nothing.

(more…)

If the roads are going to allow you to drive an air-polluting automobile, they could at least do their part to take those toxins out of the sky.

Dutch scientists from University of Twente have created concrete paving stones with an additive created from titanium dioxide. The nitrogen oxides released by cars bind to the additive, changing from a greenhouse gas into benign nitrates.

(more…)

Do penguins like salsa?

As the continents have made their slow drift around the world, the landmasses have intermingled in all sorts of ways, and occasionally formed supercontinents like Pangaea and Gondwanaland. Now, University of Minnesota Duluth geologist John Goodge says that in a supercontinent called Rodinia, which sat near the Equator 800 million years ago, Antarctica and Arizona used to be neighbors.

According to Science News, experts have argued over what bordered Laurentia—the geologic name for the large landmass that contained most of what is now North America—during the time the continents were clustered in Rodinia. Australia, Siberia and China were all candidates.

So Goodge tested the presence of different chemical isotopes, trying to get a match. And he did—to Eastern Antarctica. Granite found there matches the chemical composition of granite from the American Southwest, he says, and the Transantarctic Mountains contain the same sediments as Laurentian samples he’s studied.

The Antarctica-America connection may have been short-lived; Rodinia broke apart about 750 million years ago. No word yet whether the split was amicable.

Image: iStockphoto

The creators of The Red Balloon probably never had this in mind.

Aérophile, a French company that produces hot air balloons, has created a model that changes color to tell people how clean—or unclean—the Parisian air is that day. After gathering data from Airparif, an agency that monitors air quality in France, the balloon’s owners will adjust its color to correspond with the pollution level—green meaning excellent air quality, yellow signifying OK, and red meaning highly polluted.

(more…)

Keren Blankfeld Schultz at Scientific American has an interesting report on the effects of severe weather on the length of a single day, or the total time it takes Earth to rotate once on its axis. As it turns out, the speed of the planet’s rotation is determined by the amount of mass across its surface, which is made up of the “roiling aggregation of gases that comprise the atmosphere, the solid earth itself, its fluid core, and the sloshing ocean.”

So when an event that has the power to move a huge amount of mass—such as, say, an earthquake and/or tsunami—occurs, it can alter the earth’s rotation speed enough to lengthen or shorten a day by as much as several thousandths of a second.

(more…)