Element FYI

The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Fossil Energy reported today that it has delivered the first crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as promised by President Bush to offset shortages resulting from Hurricane Katrina. A total of 30 million barrels were offered and 11 million barrels were sold to five companies in a competitive bidding process. An additional loan of 13.2 million barrels of crude oil has been made to refiners whose deliveries were interrupted. But where is all the oil coming from? Are we going to run out? The DOE website contains a long list of online resources that describe various efforts to ensure reliable supplies in the future, from methane hydrates to the use of CO2 injections to recover previously unattainable resources in the ground. According to the DOE site, "If only one percent of the methane hydrate resource could be made technically and economically recoverable, the United States could more than double its domestic natural gas resource base."

Drs. John Delaney and Debbie Kelley from the University of Washington are leading the VISIONS '05 expedition on the research vessel R/V Thompson and have been at sea since September 1. Live broadcasts from the ship and from the seafloor, using a high-definition underwater video camera mounted on the arm of the Jason II remotely operated vehicle (ROV), are scheduled for today, Wednesday, and Thursday. You may watch these broadcasts on the web or via cable TV. For directions on how to connect and for the complete broadcast schedule, click here. Pre-taped footage will air whenever live broadcasts are not available.

The Senate voted on September 15 to provide the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) with $5.5 billion for fiscal year 2006 (10/1/05 - 9/30/06) in its approval by a 91-4 vote of the Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations Act. According to a statement released by NSF, "Congress will not be able to finish its work on the measure before the end of the current fiscal year, on September 30. Until a final bill is signed by the President, temporary funding for the NSF and the other included agencies will have to be provided by short term extensions of their current budgets." Many programs received very modest 0.30% increases over 2005 levels. The Education and Human Resources account was funded 11% below current levels but 1% above the request. The Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) account was funded 11% above current levels but 23% below the budget request. The NSF FY 2006 Budget Request document can be found here.

In his Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, Dr. Daniel C. Dennett, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University, and author of "Freedom Evolves" and "Darwin's Dangerous Idea, explains how supporters of Intelligent Design have spread the thinking that there is a legitimate scientific debate over Darwinism. There isn't. But Prof. Dennett says, "Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.... Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. "Smith's work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat," you say, misrepresenting Smith's work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: "See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms." And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details." There's more in the article if you follow the link (NY Times registration required).

Yes, it's summer, and I'm afraid that not a lot of big research is going on. Of course, there are probably one or two things, but most professors and their graduate students are taking time off for summer vacations. Yaaaaawwn. I could use one myself. Why don't YOU send in a story or a web link? You can submit stories or links to cool science websites for inclusion in the Element List directory. We particularly look for stories that are beyond the radar of mainstream news media. Send your science link or story to submissions@elementlist.com. If they're really cool, we'll profile them on Element FYI.

With gas prices going up, more and more people are looking to alternative energy sources to keep our lights on and our cars moving. Finding an alternative that is cost efficient and environmentally friendly, however, is proving to be a big challenge. Researchers at the Motor Systems Resource Facility at Oregon State University have developed a way to harness the energy in ocean waves using buoys which house magnetic generators. The buoys are anchored 1-2 miles offshore from the Oregon coast, where repetitive ocean swells generate electricity by causing electric coils in the buoys to move up and down around a magnetic shaft. A range of coil-magnet geometries and configurations are being tested, including a rotary generator. The researchers say that only 0.2% of the ocean's energy is needed to provide power for the entire world. But the real question is, how many buoys will we need???

At the 2005 National Education Summit on High Schools, Bill Gates addressed the nation's governors, chief executives, and education leaders with the pronouncement that "our high schools even when theyre working exactly as designed cannot teach our kids what they need to know today." "When I compare our high schools to what I see when Im traveling abroad," said Gates, "I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow.In math and science, our 4th graders are among the top students in the world. By 8th grade, theyre in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations." Gates brought up more statistics: "In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelors degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering." The question is, what is anyone doing about it? For starters, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is investing millions of dollars into American schools with the goals of raising high school graduation rates and preparing all students for college and work though a range of programs. You can read Gates' speech here and find out more about the educational programs on the Gates Foundation website.

How would you model human social interactions? What are the essential elements of human interactions? We think about a person across the room. We probe perhaps by studying the way they are dressed or by asking our friends about the person. We connect by talking to the person and making eye contact. Then we disconnect if and when we decide we no longer want contact with that person. With essential basic elements such as these, Ebon Fisher has created the Zoacodes, which collectively exist within The Nervepool, an attempt to model human social interactions in a language of networks, similar to telecommunication networks. In the early 1990s Fisher established "community-based media rituals" in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in which to study human relations. Fisher's work seems to cross the bounaries between art, science, philosophy, and multimedia entertainment. But are these social scientific experiments or multimedia art parties? "Like much of the party culture, they tend to flirt with classic values of peace and love," says Fisher. "But not surprisingly, most traditional religions and cultures share these values as well."

The National Science Foundation is harnessing the power of the internet to present fascinating multimedia overviews of the several areas of research funded by NSF. In the overview of Chemistry and Materials, otherwise known as the science of stuff, NSF covers the hottest new topics in the field, from concepts of emergence and self-organization to green chemistry to the creation of new molecules and materials. The cool, state-of-the-art research described here is far removed from those torturous lessons in balancing chemical equations that you covered in high school. Here you can find out about what scientists are doing now to understand not only how nature's materials behave at the molecular to nanoscale level, but how to control them and create new materials. Interested in a career in chemistry? This is the place to start.

It is said that we know less about the Earth's oceans than we do about the entire surface of the moon, but advances in broadband communications may finally change all that. Several major research intiatives are underway to install cabled observatories offshore the US coastline. NEPTUNE, one of the first and most ambitious programs, intends to create a 2,000 mile-long cabled observatory that wraps around the Juan de Fuca and Gorda oceanic plates off the northwest US coast. Last year, NSF awarded $3.9 million to the University of Washington, University of California, San Diego, and partner institutions to create the Laboratory for the Ocean Observatory Knowledge Integration Grid, or LOOKING project, which will design the cyberinfrastructure that is central to NEPTUNE and other observatories, such as the Monterey Accelerated Research System (MARS) run by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). Coordination between the various research programs at the national level will be managed and operated by the Ocean Research Interactive Observatory Networks (ORION) program. When installed these observatories will provide for the first time the essential infrastructure needed for long-term, continuous, in situ observations in the deep sea, and will enable scientists to study the oceans from the comfort of their laptops.

NASA completed an important first step last week in the effort to locate Earthlike planets outside of our solar system. Using the Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA captured direct infrared light from two extrasolar planets for the first time in history. This feat is exceptional given that planets do not give off their own light, but reflect light from their sun. NASA has prepared a long-term research plan dubbed Planet Quest that involves several missions scheduled over the next fifteen years with the objective of finding Earthlike planets outside our solar system. The Planet Quest website contains links to multimedia features and videos including Planet Quest: The Search for Another Earth and PlanetQuest: The Movie. Thus far NASA has indirectly identified more than 140 extrasolar planets, typically by measuring changes in the position or brightness of the host star (see Four ways to find a planet). The high temperatures of the two newly discovered planets, however, make the possibility of either planet supporting life unlikely. Spitzer was not originally designed to detect planets, making this discovery a bonus for the mission.

When Einstein published his Theory of General Relativity in 1916, he predicted the existence of gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space-time created by cosmic events such as supernova explosions or colliding black holes. The technology needed to detect gravitational waves, however, has only recently been developed. In 1999 construction was completed on the US Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), a $300 million project funded by the National Science Foundation, that consists of two facilities located in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, that are designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves. The observational datasets generated by these facilities are so huge that Dr. Bruce Allen, Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and a former Ph.D. student of Stephen Hawking, has created the Einstein@home distributed computing project. The project will allow private computer users to search LIGO datasets for evidence of gravitational waves. Modeled on the SETI@home project, computer users download a screensaver program that crunches LIGO data while they are away from their computer. The project will search datasets from both US LIGO observatories as well as the UK-German-led GEO 600 observatory located in Hanover, Germany. The project began with 6,000 users when it launched on February 19th and within two weeks was adding users at a rate of about 1,000 per day. Einstein@home is supported by the American Physical Society as part of the World Year of Physics 2005 celebration.

Don't let a silly thing like the SAT keep you from getting a world-class education. Thanks to MIT's OpenCourseWare project, you can now access materials from more than 900 MIT undergraduate and graduate courses for free, and no registration is required. MIT OpenCourseWare course materials include syllabi, reading lists, study materials, and, for some, even audio and video lectures. You can download lectures in MP3 format from Prof. Gerald E. Schneider's undergraduate course on Neuroscience and Behavior, for example, and listen to them on your iPod. The MIT OCW group expects to have 1800 courses online from all five of MIT's schools representing 33 disciplines by 2008. The things you don't get are access to MIT faculty and a degree at the end to hang on your wall, but those cost only an extra $30,800 per year in tuition and fees, and, oh yeah, that dreaded SAT score.

A five and half day swarm of small earthquakes was detected on the Endeavour segment of the Juan de Fuca Ridge offshore of the northwest coast of Washington beginning the morning of Sunday, February 27, 2005. Seismic monitoring by NOAA Vents Program scientists using the SOSUS array detected 3,742 earthquakes, the largest reaching a magnitude of 4.9. A rapid response geological survey of the area carried out 6 days later found no new lavas or hydrothermal disturbances at the seafloor, suggesting that the events were caused by an intrusion of magma from deep beneath the ridge crest.

Has it been a year already? NASA landed its first Mars rover Spirit on January 3, 2004, which was soon followed by the rover Opportunity on January 24, 2004, after a seven-month journey of nearly 300 million miles from planet Earth. To celebrate this historic event, NASA has created a special Mars Anniversary Flash website that reviews the extraordinary accomplishments of the twin rover expeditions to Mars. Take a guided slide show and audio tour, or sit back and watch home movies of the landers as they navigate across the rocky terrain. The Flash website also provides glimpses of Mars missions to come including the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission planned to launch in August of this year and arrive in 2006, the Mars Phoenix Lander mission scheduled to arrive on Mars in 2008, and the Mars Science Laboratory mission planned to arrive in 2010. Among the top priorities of these missions is to study the atmospheric and soil compositions to determine whether environmental conditions have existed that could support life on Mars. You can keep up with the daily progress of the current rover mission by visiting the Mars Exploration Rover Mission homepage.

We knew The San Francisco Exploratorium had good taste in its monthly selection of Ten Cool websites. We were especially surprised to hear that they've picked ELEMENT for its top ten list! You can now find us and other cool science websites listed here on the Exploratorium Ten Cool Sites webpage. Thanks Exploratorium!