The Solar wind today is 349.3 and the proton count is 0.3 Sunspot AR1416 tripled in size this weekend and, in the process, developed a "beta-gamma" magnetic field that harbors energy for M-class solar flares. NOAA forecasters estimate a 30% chance of M-flares during the next 24 hours. Any such eruption would likely be Earth-directed as the sunspot is facing our planet.
On Feb. 3rd, Iran launched the country's third satellite. Named "Navid," the 110-pound mini-spacecraft is meant to stay in orbit for 18 months, sending back images to Iran as it completes a revolution of Earth every 90 minutes.
World’s Oldest Living Thing
By Jonathan Pearlman, Sydney
1:06PM GMT 07 Feb 2012
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Australian scientists sequenced the DNA of samples of the giant seagrass, Posidonia oceanic, from 40 underwater meadows in an area spanning more than 2,000 miles, from Spain to Cyprus.
The analysis, published in the journal PLos ONE, found the seagrass was between 12,000 and 200,000 years old and was most likely to be at least 100,000 years old. This is far older than the current known oldest species, a Tasmanian plant that is believed to be 43,000 years old.
Prof Carlos Duarte, from the University of Western Australia, said the seagrass has been able to reach such old age because it can reproduce asexually and generate clones of itself. Organisms that can only reproduce sexually are inevitably lost at each generation, he added.
"They are continually producing new branches," he told The Daily Telegraph. "They spread very slowly and cover a very large area giving them more area to mine resources. They can then store nutrients within their very large branches during bad conditions for growth."
The separate patches of seagrass in the Mediterranean span almost 10 miles and weigh more than 6,000 tons.
But Prof Duarte said that while the seagrass is one of the world's most resilient organisms, it has begun to decline due to coastal development and global warming.
"If climate change continues, the outlook for this species is very bad," he said.
"The seagrass in the Mediterranean is already in clear decline due to shoreline construction and declining water quality and this decline has been exacerbated by climate change. As the water warms, the organisms move slowly to higher altitudes. The Mediterranean is locked to the north by the European continent.
"They cannot move. The outlook is very bad."
The BMI: Brain Machine Interface
By Andrew Hough
7:15AM GMT 07 Feb 2012
Researchers found the Armed Forces could harness the rapid advance of neuroscience to improve the training of soldiers, pilots and other personnel.
A study, from the Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of science, showed the possible benefits of neuroscience to military and law enforcement.
It predicted new designer drugs that boost performance, make enemy troops fall asleep and ensure captives become more talkative.
But among the more remarkable scenarios suggested in the report involved the use of devices called brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) to connect soldiers' brains directly to military technology such as drones and weapons.
The study, published on Tuesday, stated that the work built on previous research that has enabled people to control cursors and artificial limbs through BMIs that read their brain signals.
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In their report, one of a series from the Royal Society looking at the field of neuroscience, the experts call on the UK Government to be as "transparent as possible" about research into military and law enforcement applications.
"Since the human brain can process images, such as targets, much faster than the subject is consciously aware of, a neurally interfaced weapons system could provide significant advantages over other system control methods in terms of speed and accuracy," the report states.
The report also showed how neuroscientists employed so-called “transcranial direct current stimulation” (tDCS) to improve soldiers' awareness while in hostile environments.
It showed how soldiers’ ability to spot roadside bombs, snipers and other hidden threats were improved in a virtual reality training program used by US troops bound for the Middle East
But the report’s authors argued that while hostile uses of neuroscience and related technologies were now more likely, scientists were oblivious to its potentials.
While the benefits to society were obvious, through improved treatments for brain disease and mental illness, there were serious security implications to consider.
"Neuroscience will have more of an impact in the future," said Prof Rod Flower, chair of the report's working group.
"People can see a lot of possibilities, but so far very few have made their way through to actual use. All leaps forward start out this way.”
Prof Flower, from the William Harvey Research Institute at Barts and the London Hospital added: “You have a groundswell of ideas and suddenly you get a step change."
"If you are controlling a drone and you shoot the wrong target or bomb a wedding party, who is responsible for that action? Is it you or the BMI.
“There's a blurring of the line between individual responsibility and the functioning of the machine. Where do you stop and the machine begin?"
Vince Clark, a cognitive neuroscientist and lead author on the study at the University of New Mexico, admitted he was uncomfortable in knowing neuroscience could be used by the military.
"As a scientist I dislike that someone might be hurt by my work,” he said. “I want to reduce suffering, to make the world a better place, but there are people in the world with different intentions, and I don't know how to deal with that.
"If I stop my work, the people who might be helped won't be helped. Almost any technology has a defence application."
The Ministry of Defence has not commented on the report.
The Himalayas and nearby peaks have lost no ice in past 10 years, study shows
Meltwater from Asia's peaks is much less than previously estimated, but lead scientist says the loss of ice caps and glaciers around the world remains a serious concern
• Live Q&A: What does the Himalaya glacier study mean for climate change?
• In pictures: the best images of the Earth from space
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Hopar glacier in Pakistan. Melting ice outside the two largest caps - Greenland and Antarctica - is much less than previously estimated, the study has found. Photograph: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
The world's greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows.
The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.
The study is the first to survey all the world's icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less than previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.
Bristol University glaciologist Prof Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, said: "The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero."
The melting of Himalayan glaciers caused controversy in 2009 when a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mistakenly stated that they would disappear by 2035, instead of 2350. However, the scientist who led the new work is clear that while greater uncertainty has been discovered in Asia's highest mountains, the melting of ice caps and glaciers around the world remains a serious concern.
"Our results and those of everyone else show we are losing a huge amount of water into the oceans every year," said Prof John Wahr of the University of Colorado. "People should be just as worried about the melting of the world's ice as they were before."
His team's study, published in the journal Nature, concludes that between 443-629bn tonnes of meltwater overall are added to the world's oceans each year. This is raising sea level by about 1.5mm a year, the team reports, in addition to the 2mm a year caused by expansion of the warming ocean.
The scientists are careful to point out that lower-altitude glaciers in the Asian mountain ranges – sometimes dubbed the "third pole" – are definitely melting. Satellite images and reports confirm this. But over the study period from 2003-10 enough ice was added to the peaks to compensate.
The impact on predictions for future sea level rise is yet to be fully studied but Bamber said: "The projections for sea level rise by 2100 will not change by much, say 5cm or so, so we are talking about a very small modification." Existing estimates range from 30cm to 1m.
Wahr warned that while crucial to a better understanding of ice melting, the eight years of data is a relatively short time period and that variable monsoons mean year-to-year changes in ice mass of hundreds of billions of tonnes. "It is awfully dangerous to take an eight-year record and predict even the next eight years, let alone the next century," he said.
The reason for the radical reappraisal of ice melting in Asia is the different ways in which the current and previous studies were conducted. Until now, estimates of meltwater loss for all the world's 200,000 glaciers were based on extrapolations of data from a few hundred monitored on the ground. Those glaciers at lower altitudes are much easier for scientists to get to and so were more frequently included, but they were also more prone to melting.
The bias was particularly strong in Asia, said Wahr: "There extrapolation is really tough as only a handful of lower-altitude glaciers are monitored and there are thousands there very high up."
The new study used a pair of satellites, called Grace, which measure tiny changes in the Earth's gravitational pull. When ice is lost, the gravitational pull weakens and is detected by the orbiting spacecraft. "They fly at 500km, so they see everything," said Wahr, including the hard-to-reach, high-altitude glaciers.
"I believe this data is the most reliable estimate of global glacier mass balance that has been produced to date," said Bamber. He noted that 1.4 billion people depend on the rivers that flow from the Himalayas and Tibetan plateau: "That is a compelling reason to try to understand what is happening there better."
He added: "The new data does not mean that concerns about climate change are overblown in any way. It means there is a much larger uncertainty in high mountain Asia than we thought. Taken globally all the observations of the Earth's ice – permafrost, Arctic sea ice, snow cover and glaciers – are going in the same direction."
Grace launched in 2002 and continues to monitor the planet, but it has passed its expected mission span and its batteries are beginning to weaken. A replacement mission has been approved by the US and German space agencies and could launch in 2016.
• This article was amended on 9 February 2012. The original sub-heading read "Melting ice from Asia's peaks is much less then previously estimated" as did the photo caption and text: "Melting ice outside the two largest caps - Greenland and Antarctica - is much less then previously estimated". These have all been corrected.
It’ll be Alright says the phone
“We’re trying to develop individual algorithms for each user that can determine specific states, so their location where they are, their activity, their social context, who they’re with, what they’re engaged in, and their mood,” Mohr said.
That way, if someone is sitting at home for days on end feeling depressed, the phone could sense it.
“It can provide them an automated text message, or an automated phone call to make a suggestion to give somebody a call or get out of the house,” Mohr said.
Dr. Mohr says tests with eight patients so far, have shown that the phone “therapist,” has been helpful in lifting their moods.
“They all had a major depressive disorder when they started, and they were all both clinically and statistically better at the end of the treatment,” he said.
Dr. Mohr said the technology could offer more cost-effective ways to treat depression. He plans more widespread tests this summer.
The Case of the Blank Checkbook
House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said that Congress does not need an official federal budget because it can just adopt appropriations bills and authorization policies as needed to keep operating.
At a briefing with journalists on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, Hoyer was asked, “Mr. Hoyer, around the same time of the State of the Union [on Jan. 24], I think it was the same day, Republicans were trying to hit Senate Democrats for 1,000 days without passing a budget, and then you talk about this milestone today, 400 days without a jobs bill in the Republican House. But then on Friday [Democratic Senator Harry] Reid said that he didn’t think they needed to bring a budget to the floor this year [and that] the Budget Control Act can serve as a guideline.”
Hoyer said: “What does the budget do? The budget does one thing and really only one thing: It sets the parameters of spending and discretionary caps. Other than that, the Appropriations committee are not bound by the Budget committee’s priorities.”
He continued: “The fact is, you don’t need a budget. We can adopt appropriations bills. We can adopt authorization policies without a budget. We already have an agreed-upon cap on spending.”
Hoyer criticized the Republicans for not passing a budget for “a number of years” when they were in control of the House, Senate, and the presidency under George W. Bush.