Month: September 2018

Enlarge / Detail of the plug of an electric car being charged (credit: Getty Images)

On Friday, California's Air Resources Board (CARB) announced that it would tighten restrictions on transportation fuels in the state in the hopes of spurring adoption of electric, hydrogen, and biofuel-based cars, trucks, buses, and even planes.

Since 2011, CARB has had a Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) on the books that requires a 10 percent reduction in "carbon intensity" for all fuels sold in California by 2020. Carbon intensity for fuels takes into account lifecycle carbon emissions, including any emissions created processing oil into gasoline, processing feedstock into ethanol, or transporting a fuel from a refinery to the point of sale.

With CARB's decision on Friday, the lifecycle emissions for transportation fuels needs to drop by 20 percent by 2030.

Enlarge (credit: John Wilson Carmichael)

Lead poisoning may have made life difficult for the doomed men of John Franklin’s 1845 expedition, which got lost in the Arctic while in search of the Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But it probably didn’t contribute much to their inevitable fates. That’s the conclusion of a new study of lead concentrations in the hair of one of the men who died while the expedition was stranded on King William Island between late 1846 and early 1848.

129 Doomed Men

Captain Sir John Franklin’s expedition wasn’t the first to sail north in search of a passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and it wasn’t the last. But its disappearance left behind a compelling mystery, one kept in the public consciousness for years by the tireless efforts of Franklin’s widow. For years in the late 19th century, the search for the lost sailing ships HMS Terror and HMS Erebus nearly rivaled the search for the Northwest Passage itself.

Thanks to a note found in 1869 on King William Island, we know that all was well on the wooden ships in May of 1847, aside from being stuck in the ice. But by April of 1848, 24 men had died, including Franklin and the expedition’s assistant surgeon, naturalist Harry Goodsir. The remaining 105 had abandoned their trapped ships and set off across the ice to try to reach Back River on the Canadian mainland. Neither ship would be seen again for over 150 years. A century and a half later, historians are still debating exactly what went wrong.

Enlarge / Hurricane Florence the morning of Sept. 12 as it churned across the Atlantic in a west-northwesterly direction with winds of 130 miles an hour. (credit: NASA Johnson)

Climate change is a classic tragedy of the commons: every country acting in its own self-interest contributes to depleting a joint resource, making the world worse for everyone. If you’ve ever lived with bad roommates, the concept will be easy to grasp. The social cost of carbon (or SCC) is a way to put a price tag on the result of that tragedy, quantifying just how much climate change will cost the world over the coming generations.

But a paper in Nature Climate Change this week tries to bring the cost closer to home by estimating what the SCC could be for each different country. These new calculations point to a wide range of different cost possibilities but with a few consistent messages: the cost is likely to be higher than previous estimates; the US will be one of the worst-hit countries; and many of the countries contributing the least to the problem will be slammed regardless.

Transparency, uncertainty, and rigor

The concept of SCC has been around for a long time, with a huge range of different ways to calculate it. Because it’s impossible to know for sure what the future holds, those estimates end up with quite different outcomes depending on the assumptions they make. For instance, it’s impossible to know for sure what economic growth will be, and so different educated guesses about that will lead to different SCC estimates.

Étienne Léopold Trouvelot

We live in a golden age of astrophotography, with a feast of jaw-dropping images from the farthest reaches of space crossing our news feeds on a daily basis. But sometimes it's good to revisit the imagery of our pre-photographic past—in this case, the work of 19th-century illustrator Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. The Frenchman, once dubbed the "prince of observers," produced some 7000 astronomical illustrations over his lifetime, and we're featuring some of the best of them here.

Trouvelot was born in Aisne, France, but his political leanings put him at odds with Napoleon Bonaparte. After Napoleon's 1852 coup d'état, Trouvelot fled the country with his family in 1855 and landed in the Medford suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. Trained as an artist, nature illustrator, and printmaker, Trouvelot fell in love with astronomy after witnessing several auroras, and he began illustrating the amateur observations he spied through his small telescope.

Enlarge / Yes, those are crickets adorning this otherwise standard chips-and-guac. (credit: John Timmer)

Around this time last year, one of our intrepid staff members took on something that's on the verge of being a culinary trend: eating bugs. In Beth's case, this involved incorporating cricket-based flour into a traditional muffin recipe. The results were anything but positive.

Still, that was just one implementation of a single type of bug—we hadn't really given eating them the traditional Ars "thoroughly reviewed" exploration. So, when an opportunity presented itself to try a much larger assortment of insects (and a couple arachnids) prepared in a variety of ways, I quickly signed up.

Why bugs, why now?

Part of the reason is that it isn't actually "now." Cultures all over the world have been incorporating insects into their cuisine for ages. Many of us have only become aware of bug-eating as a result of the development of travel-eating as a television genre, popularized by people like Andrew Zimmerman and the late Anthony Bourdain.