Month: February 2016

(video link)

My smoke detectors were dying, with a scheduled end-of-life date of 2016. Because I'm the kind of person who over-researches even the best kind of hangers to use in his closet, this provided the opportunity to do something more than run down to the hardware store and pick up a couple of screamin' cheapies as replacements.

Instead, I would find and purchase the Best Smoke Detector Ever.

At the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Rice University's Andrea Isella began his talk with words that can start a brawl among astronomy fans: "Everybody knows we have these eight beautiful planets in our Solar System." But he continued with words we can all agree on: we'd like to know how they got here and whether they represent a typical assortment we'd expect to see around other stars.

To answer both of these questions, we need to understand planet formation. And the best way to do that is to image as many systems as we can find that are in the process of forming planets. That process poses a number of challenges, however. In astronomical terms, planet formation is fast, taking place in 10 million years or so, and the process takes place in a diffuse, dusty disk that makes it difficult to do observations at visible wavelengths.

But we now have staggeringly precise images of these disks, thanks to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA. ALMA is capable of identifying the chemical composition of the disks, along with irregularities in their distribution and the motion of different parts of the disk. Isella and other researchers were on hand to tell what we've learned from this sort of information.

The 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in western Africa made the virus a major public health concern. It increased the push to develop an Ebola vaccine, but there’s also interest in developing a therapeutic treatment, which could limit any future outbreaks after they start.

A recent study published in Science shows that antibodies that target part of a protein on the surface of the Ebola virus makes an effective therapy for Ebola infection in mice. This finding is remarkable because researchers obtained the antibodies from a human survivor of an earlier Ebola outbreak.

Glycoproteins exist on the external shell of a virus and are often used by the virus to latch on to host cells. But their location also make them recognizable by the host’s immune system, which manufactures antibodies against them. The Ebola virus has its own distinctive glycoprotein, which is the only known target for a human antibody response.

One of the obstacles to making the case for environmental policies is that the financial cost of an action can be easy to calculate, while the benefits can be much more difficult to fully quantify. Good deals can be made to sound like money pits when the costs are emphasized without the context of the benefits.

When it comes to action on climate change, there has been some effort to put numbers on the costs and benefits of certain courses of action. But a new study from Drew Shindell and Yunha Lee of Duke University and NASA’s Greg Faluvegi looks at the benefits of more aggressive US actions—ones that could actually put us on the path to meeting the goal of limiting climate change to less than 2ºC warming. While the 2ºC limit is the stated goal of international negotiations, it is quickly slipping out of reach. So what would happen if the US went for it?

The researchers look at a scenario in which the US cuts emissions to 40 percent below their current levels by 2030, focusing on energy and transportation. That’s a trajectory that would ultimately fulfill the US contribution to meeting a 2ºC goal, assuming it were continued. But for the purposes of this study, emissions stay steady after 2030 so that we’re purely talking about the benefits of actions in the next 14 years. This isn’t just about CO₂—all the other air pollutants that are emitted from the same smokestacks and tailpipes were analyzed as well.