No alien signal, says SETI astronomer

You might have read the stories this week about Russian astronomers detecting a possible “signal” from a star 94 light-years from Earth. The signal from sunlike star HD 164595 – said to be a very strong signal – spawned a flurry of speculation that, maybe, perhaps, at last, we’ve heard a signal from an alien civilization. In the video above, though, Seth Soshak of the SETI Institute says the signal has now been identified as being from a Russian military satellite.

Astronomer Yulia Sotnikova wrote in an update published today – August 31, 2016 – by the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences:

Subsequent processing and analysis of the signal revealed its most probable terrestrial origin. It can be said with confidence that no sought-for signal has been detected yet.

Like many other stars in our Milky Way galaxy, the star HD 164595 looked promising as an abode for alien life. Italian astronomer Claudio Maccone and others had described it as:

… a strong candidate for SETI.

What did SETI astronomers think the signal might be?

If the signal had been artificial, its strength suggested that it came from an advanced civilization, at least a Type II on the Kardashev scale, which astronomers have been talking about and speculating about for decades. The Kardashev scale – originally designed in 1964 by the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev – is a lot of fun to think about. It’s a way of imagining a civilization’s level of technological advancement, based on the amount of energy it’s able to harness.

We humans on Earth, for example, represent a Type I civilization – sometimes called planetary civilization. We have the technology to use and store energy from our sun that strikes our world’s surface, or nearby space.

A Type II civilization can do much more. It has the capability to harness the energy of the entire star. The device used to do this is called a Dyson sphere. It’s basically a big sphere built around a star that can capture its energy. Read more about Dyson spheres here.

As early as yesterday, those with technical backgrounds were already urging caution on the idea that the signal apparently from HD 164595 was a sign of aliens. On the website SETI@home, someone (apparently an astronomer) commented:

I was one of the many people who received the the email with the subject ‘Candidate SETI SIGNAL DETECTED by Russians from star HD 164595 by virtue of RATAN-600 radio telescope.’ Since the email did come from known SETI researchers, I looked over the presentation. I was unimpressed. In one out of 39 scans that passed over star showed a signal at about 4.5 times the mean noise power with a profile somewhat like the beam profile. Of course SETI@home has seen millions of potential signals with similar characteristics, but it takes more than that to make a good candidate. Multiple detections are a minimum criterion.

Because the receivers used were making broad band measurements, there’s really nothing about this “signal” that would distinguish it from a natural radio transient (stellar flare, active galactic nucleus, microlensing of a background source, etc.) There’s also nothing that could distinguish it from a satellite passing through the telescope field of view.

And so it is a satellite. To all SETI astronomers: keep searching!

So, that new SETI signal everyone is babbling about? Yeah, not really that interesting. Via https://t.co/qghGhLgMdh http://pic.twitter.com/5ro2zhxRek

— Lee Billings (@LeeBillings) August 29, 2016

Bottom line: A strong signal from sunlike star HD 164595 sparked a flurry of speculation this week that we have – at last – heard from an alien civilization. Now astronomers say the signal was from a military satellite.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2bCClV0

You might have read the stories this week about Russian astronomers detecting a possible “signal” from a star 94 light-years from Earth. The signal from sunlike star HD 164595 – said to be a very strong signal – spawned a flurry of speculation that, maybe, perhaps, at last, we’ve heard a signal from an alien civilization. In the video above, though, Seth Soshak of the SETI Institute says the signal has now been identified as being from a Russian military satellite.

Astronomer Yulia Sotnikova wrote in an update published today – August 31, 2016 – by the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences:

Subsequent processing and analysis of the signal revealed its most probable terrestrial origin. It can be said with confidence that no sought-for signal has been detected yet.

Like many other stars in our Milky Way galaxy, the star HD 164595 looked promising as an abode for alien life. Italian astronomer Claudio Maccone and others had described it as:

… a strong candidate for SETI.

What did SETI astronomers think the signal might be?

If the signal had been artificial, its strength suggested that it came from an advanced civilization, at least a Type II on the Kardashev scale, which astronomers have been talking about and speculating about for decades. The Kardashev scale – originally designed in 1964 by the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev – is a lot of fun to think about. It’s a way of imagining a civilization’s level of technological advancement, based on the amount of energy it’s able to harness.

We humans on Earth, for example, represent a Type I civilization – sometimes called planetary civilization. We have the technology to use and store energy from our sun that strikes our world’s surface, or nearby space.

A Type II civilization can do much more. It has the capability to harness the energy of the entire star. The device used to do this is called a Dyson sphere. It’s basically a big sphere built around a star that can capture its energy. Read more about Dyson spheres here.

As early as yesterday, those with technical backgrounds were already urging caution on the idea that the signal apparently from HD 164595 was a sign of aliens. On the website SETI@home, someone (apparently an astronomer) commented:

I was one of the many people who received the the email with the subject ‘Candidate SETI SIGNAL DETECTED by Russians from star HD 164595 by virtue of RATAN-600 radio telescope.’ Since the email did come from known SETI researchers, I looked over the presentation. I was unimpressed. In one out of 39 scans that passed over star showed a signal at about 4.5 times the mean noise power with a profile somewhat like the beam profile. Of course SETI@home has seen millions of potential signals with similar characteristics, but it takes more than that to make a good candidate. Multiple detections are a minimum criterion.

Because the receivers used were making broad band measurements, there’s really nothing about this “signal” that would distinguish it from a natural radio transient (stellar flare, active galactic nucleus, microlensing of a background source, etc.) There’s also nothing that could distinguish it from a satellite passing through the telescope field of view.

And so it is a satellite. To all SETI astronomers: keep searching!

So, that new SETI signal everyone is babbling about? Yeah, not really that interesting. Via https://t.co/qghGhLgMdh http://pic.twitter.com/5ro2zhxRek

— Lee Billings (@LeeBillings) August 29, 2016

Bottom line: A strong signal from sunlike star HD 164595 sparked a flurry of speculation this week that we have – at last – heard from an alien civilization. Now astronomers say the signal was from a military satellite.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2bCClV0

Will Planet 9 spell doom for solar system?

View larger. | Artist’s concept via University of Warwick.

We frequently get messages from an anxious people asking about Nibiru, which doesn’t exist, by the way, but which zealous or uninformed or unscrupulous websites and YouTube videos say is a large planet due for a disastrous encounter with Earth very soon. Actually, it’s supposed to have happened years ago, but who’s counting? Nibiru is one of many internet hoaxes. Meanwhile – confusingly – in scientific circles, there is a hypothetical Planet 9, announced by astronomers in early 2016. Thus astrophysicists at University of Warwick were likely having fun with their famous deadpan British humor, and also perhaps looking for media attention, when they used the words “doom for solar system” in their August 30, 2016 statement about the hypothetical Planet 9 ejecting Jupiter from our solar system after our sun dies, billions of years from now:

The solar system could be thrown into disaster when the sun dies if the mysterious ‘Planet Nine’ exists, according to research from the University of Warwick.

Yes, these are real theoretical astrophysicists – bound by the laws of physics and the power of their computers – not internet hoaxers. It can be hard to tell the difference sometimes, right? One way to tell is to look for publication in peer-reviewed journals like the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , where this work has been accepted.

The work is led by Dimitri Veras of University of Warwick. His group says that the presence of Planet 9 – the hypothetical planet which may exist on the outskirts of our solar system – could cause the elimination of at least one of the giant planets after the sun dies, probably Jupiter, hurling it or them into interstellar space through a sort of ‘pinball’ effect. Veras’ statement explains:

When the sun starts to die in around seven billion years, it will blow away half of its own mass and inflate itself — swallowing the Earth — before fading into an ember known as a white dwarf. This mass ejection will push Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune out to what was assumed a safe distance.

However, Dr. Veras has discovered that the existence of Planet 9 could rewrite this happy ending. He found that Planet 9 might not be pushed out in the same way, and in fact might instead be thrust inward into a death dance with the solar system’s four known giant planets — most notably Uranus and Neptune. The most likely result is ejection from the solar system, forever.

Using a unique code that can simulate the death of planetary systems, Dr. Veras has mapped numerous different positions where a ‘Planet 9’ could change the fate of the solar system. The further away and the more massive the planet is, the higher the chance that the solar system will experience a violent future.

Veras and his group point out that their work sheds light not just on the fate of our solar system, but also on:

… planetary architectures in different solar systems. Almost half of existing white dwarfs contain rock, a potential signature of the debris generated from a similarly calamitous fate in other systems with distant ‘Planet 9s’ of their own.

In effect, the future death of our sun could explain the evolution of other planetary systems.

By the way, the soon-to-be-published paper of these astronomers will be given the less provocative title of ‘The fates of solar system analogues with one additional distant planet.’ Look for it soon in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Read the rest of Veras’ statement here

Want to know more about hypothetical Planet 9 at our solar system’s outskirts? Remember, it hasn’t been discovered. So far, it’s just a very, very educated and high tech conjecture. The video below explains more:

And back to Nibiru, just for a moment. It’s supposedly “revealed near the sun” in photos. The photos I’ve seen all actually show either the brightest planet Venus (now low in the west after sunset) or, more often, lens flares. Lens flares often appear on photos as globes of light near bright objects such as the sun or moon. We see a lot of them here at EarthSky, on photos submitted by our community. They’re not really objects in the sky. They’re internal reflections from peoples’ cameras. Read more about lens flares.

I found this photo on a website about Nirbiru, but it’s really a lens flare, an internal reflection from the photographer’s camera.

Bottom line: Theoretical astrophysicists at University of Warwick announced on August 30, 2016 that a hypothetical Planet 9 could hurtle Jupiter into interstellar space when the sun dies, billions of years from now.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2bCPzwj

View larger. | Artist’s concept via University of Warwick.

We frequently get messages from an anxious people asking about Nibiru, which doesn’t exist, by the way, but which zealous or uninformed or unscrupulous websites and YouTube videos say is a large planet due for a disastrous encounter with Earth very soon. Actually, it’s supposed to have happened years ago, but who’s counting? Nibiru is one of many internet hoaxes. Meanwhile – confusingly – in scientific circles, there is a hypothetical Planet 9, announced by astronomers in early 2016. Thus astrophysicists at University of Warwick were likely having fun with their famous deadpan British humor, and also perhaps looking for media attention, when they used the words “doom for solar system” in their August 30, 2016 statement about the hypothetical Planet 9 ejecting Jupiter from our solar system after our sun dies, billions of years from now:

The solar system could be thrown into disaster when the sun dies if the mysterious ‘Planet Nine’ exists, according to research from the University of Warwick.

Yes, these are real theoretical astrophysicists – bound by the laws of physics and the power of their computers – not internet hoaxers. It can be hard to tell the difference sometimes, right? One way to tell is to look for publication in peer-reviewed journals like the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , where this work has been accepted.

The work is led by Dimitri Veras of University of Warwick. His group says that the presence of Planet 9 – the hypothetical planet which may exist on the outskirts of our solar system – could cause the elimination of at least one of the giant planets after the sun dies, probably Jupiter, hurling it or them into interstellar space through a sort of ‘pinball’ effect. Veras’ statement explains:

When the sun starts to die in around seven billion years, it will blow away half of its own mass and inflate itself — swallowing the Earth — before fading into an ember known as a white dwarf. This mass ejection will push Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune out to what was assumed a safe distance.

However, Dr. Veras has discovered that the existence of Planet 9 could rewrite this happy ending. He found that Planet 9 might not be pushed out in the same way, and in fact might instead be thrust inward into a death dance with the solar system’s four known giant planets — most notably Uranus and Neptune. The most likely result is ejection from the solar system, forever.

Using a unique code that can simulate the death of planetary systems, Dr. Veras has mapped numerous different positions where a ‘Planet 9’ could change the fate of the solar system. The further away and the more massive the planet is, the higher the chance that the solar system will experience a violent future.

Veras and his group point out that their work sheds light not just on the fate of our solar system, but also on:

… planetary architectures in different solar systems. Almost half of existing white dwarfs contain rock, a potential signature of the debris generated from a similarly calamitous fate in other systems with distant ‘Planet 9s’ of their own.

In effect, the future death of our sun could explain the evolution of other planetary systems.

By the way, the soon-to-be-published paper of these astronomers will be given the less provocative title of ‘The fates of solar system analogues with one additional distant planet.’ Look for it soon in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Read the rest of Veras’ statement here

Want to know more about hypothetical Planet 9 at our solar system’s outskirts? Remember, it hasn’t been discovered. So far, it’s just a very, very educated and high tech conjecture. The video below explains more:

And back to Nibiru, just for a moment. It’s supposedly “revealed near the sun” in photos. The photos I’ve seen all actually show either the brightest planet Venus (now low in the west after sunset) or, more often, lens flares. Lens flares often appear on photos as globes of light near bright objects such as the sun or moon. We see a lot of them here at EarthSky, on photos submitted by our community. They’re not really objects in the sky. They’re internal reflections from peoples’ cameras. Read more about lens flares.

I found this photo on a website about Nirbiru, but it’s really a lens flare, an internal reflection from the photographer’s camera.

Bottom line: Theoretical astrophysicists at University of Warwick announced on August 30, 2016 that a hypothetical Planet 9 could hurtle Jupiter into interstellar space when the sun dies, billions of years from now.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2bCPzwj

September 2016 bright planet guide

Skywatcher, by Predrag Agatonovic.

All five bright planets start out as evening objects in September 2016, but two are hard to see. Mercury and Jupiter are quickly fading into the glare of sunset, and will move into the morning sky later this month. Venus, Mars and Saturn adorn the evening sky all through September. Venus is up just after sunset (setting before nightfall at northerly latitudes or shortly after dark in the Southern Hemisphere). The other two evening planets – Mars and Saturn – stay out until late evening at mid-northern latitudes (or until midnight or beyond as seen from the Southern Hemisphere). Mars is still bright, forming a noticeable triangle on the sky’s dome with Saturn and the bright star Antares. Follow the links below to learn more about September planets in 2016.

Brilliant Venus sets at dusk or early evening

Mercury in morning sky by late September

Jupiter shifts from evening to morning sky

Mars, dusk until mid-to-late evening, shines near Saturn

Saturn, dusk until mid-to-late evening, shines near Mars

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Astronomy events, star parties, festivals, workshops

Visit a new EarthSky feature – Best Places to Stargaze – and add your fav.

On September 2, 2016, the moon is near Jupiter, low in the west after sunset. Venus, 3rd-brightest sky object after sun and moon, might be your ticket to finding Jupiter (4th-brightest sky object). Or you might spot the moon first that night. From very northerly latitudes, bring your binoculars. The moon and Jupiter will be exceedingly near the sunset.

By September 3, 2016, the moon will be easy to see from all parts of Earth. It’ll still be near Venus and Jupiter, shortly after sunset. Look west!

On September 4, 5 and 6, the bow of the waxing crescent moon points toward the planets Venus and Jupiter. This month, Jupiter quickly falls into the glare of sunset while Venus slowly but surely climbs away. Read more.

Brilliant Venus sets at dusk or early evening . People have been reporting sightings of the brightest planet, Venus, in the west after sunset. It’s rather low in the twilight glare, but surprisingly bright for being so close to the horizon. Everyone on Earth has a shot at seeing it, but it’s easier from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere.

Watch for Venus near the moon on September 3. Binoculars will enhance the view!

Venus will become easier to see in the western evening sky in October, and even more so in November.

By the way, when Venus passed behind the sun in June, it passed directly behind it, as seen from Earth. That happened on June 6, 2016, and at that time Venus officially transitioned from our morning to our evening sky. Exactly four years previous to Venus’ passing directly behind the sun on June 6, 2016, Venus swung directly in front of the sun on June 6, 2012. You might remember that event: the widely watched transit of Venus, during which Venus crossed the sun’s face as seen from Earth (see photos). It was the last transit of Venus until December 11, 2117.

Here’s Venus, caught from a plane over southern Oregon, on July 28, 2016. Notice the bright twilight background. Photo by Gemini Brett.

The bow of the waning crescent moon points toward Mercury’s place over the sunrise point on the horizon. Mercury is more easily viewed in the Northern Hemisphere. Read more.

Mercury in morning sky by late September. Although Mercury may still be visible as an evening object from the Southern Hemisphere in early September, this fleet-footed planet will move out of the evening sky and into the morning sky by mid-September 2016. Mercury will swing to its greatest morning elongation from the sun on September 28, to present a fine morning apparition of Mercury in the Northern Hemisphere (and not so good for the Southern Hemisphere).

Fortunately, the waning crescent moon can help you locate Mercury at and near its greatest morning elongation on September 27, September 28 and September 29.

From northerly latitudes, Mercury may remain visible before sunrise for the first week or two during October 2016. If you are blessed with clear skies, you might even see the conjunction of Mercury and Jupiter on the morning of October 11, 2016. See the sky chart below.

How many of you will see Mercury and Jupiter snuggling up together before sunrise on or near October 11, 2016?

Click here for recommended almanacs; they can give you Mercury’s rising time in your sky.

Look for the moon near Jupiter on August 5 and August 6. Binoculars could come in handy. The green line depicts the ecliptic – Earth’s orbital plane projected on the great dome of sky.

Jupiter shifts from evening to morning sky. From around the world, Jupiter quickly fades into the sunset and, for the most part, is lost in the glare of the sun throughout the month. Your best chance of spotting Jupiter this month is in the evening sky during the first few days of September. Southerly latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere are favored for seeing the last vestiges of Jupiter as an evening “star.”

If you are blessed with an unobstructed horizon in the direction of sunset, and crystal-clear skies, you might catch the young waxing crescent moon with Jupiter on or near September 2. the moon and Jupiter will be especially hard to see from northerly latitudes, so have binoculars handy!

Venus, the third-brightest celestial object, after sun and moon, may be your ticket to finding Jupiter, the fourth-brightest celestial body. At northerly latitudes, you’ll probably need binoculars to view the moon and Jupiter on this date.

After Jupiter disappears from evening sky in early September, its reappearance in the morning sky will come sometime in October 2016.

View larger | Mikhail Chubarets in the Ukraine made this chart. It shows the view of Mars through a telescope in 2016. We never see Mars as a disk like this with the eye alone. But you can see why Mars has been so bright to the eye in 2016.

Look for the moon near Saturn, Antares and Mars as darkness falls on September 7, 8 and 9. Read more.

Mars, dusk until mid-to-late evening, shines near Saturn. Mars is still bright this month, though fainter than it was earlier in 2016! Saturn came closest to Earth for the year on June 3, less than four days after Mars’ closest approach to Earth on May 30. Although Mars and Saturn are beginning to fade a bit, they’re still plenty bright and easy to see – especially Mars!

Mars was at its brightest at its opposition on May 22. Although Mars has faded since its glory days in May and June 2016, Mars is nonetheless respectably bright, shining on par with the sky’s brightest stars.

Looking for a sky almanac? EarthSky recommends…

Here’s some really good news, though. Mars is near another planet on the sky’s dome, Saturn. Look for Mars and Saturn near Antares, the brightest star in the constellation Scorpius the Scorpion. They make a noticeable triangle on the sky’s dome.

Let the moon help guide your eye to Mars (plus Saturn and the bright star Antares) for several evenings, centered on or near September 9.

Use the moon on to find the colorful threesome – Mars, Saturn and Antares – on September 8. Read more.

Saturn, dusk until mid-to-late evening, shines near Saturn. Both Mars and Saturn are near a fainter object – still one of the sky’s brightest stars – Antares in the constellation Scorpius.

The ringed planet starts out the month appearing in the southwest sky at nightfall. Although Saturn appears respectably bright, its brilliance can’t match that of Mars. Look for Saturn near Mars, even though Mars moves farther away from Saturn (and the star Antares) all month long. These two worlds form a bright celestial triangle with the star Antares in the September night sky. Mars is brighter than Saturn, which in turn is brighter than Antares.

Watch for the moon to swing by Saturn for several days, centered on or near September 8.

Saturn, the farthest world that you can easily view with the eye alone, appears golden in color. It shines with a steady light. Binoculars don’t reveal Saturn’s gorgeous rings, by the way, although binoculars will enhance Saturn’s golden color. To see the rings, you need a small telescope. A telescope will also reveal one or more of Saturn’s many moons, most notably Titan.

Tom Wildoner over-exposed Saturn itself to capture this view of Saturn’s moons on June 25, 2016. Visit Tom at LeisurelyScientist.com.

Contrasting the size of Saturn and its rings with our planet Earth via Hubble Heritage Team.

Saturn’s rings are inclined at a little more than 26^o from edge-on in August 2016, exhibiting their northern face. Next year, in October 2017, the rings will open most widely, displaying a maximum inclination of 27^o.

As with so much in space (and on Earth), the appearance of Saturn’s rings from Earth is cyclical. In the year 2025, the rings will appear edge-on as seen from Earth. After that, we’ll begin to see the south side of Saturn’s rings, to increase to a maximum inclination of 27^o by May 2032.

Click here for recommended almanacs. They can help you know when the planets rise, transit and set in your sky

What do we mean by bright planet? By bright planet, we mean any solar system planet that is easily visible without an optical aid and that has been watched by our ancestors since time immemorial. In their outward order from the sun, the five bright planets are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. These planets actually do appear bright in our sky. They are typically as bright as – or brighter than – the brightest stars. Plus, these relatively nearby worlds tend to shine with a steadier light than the distant, twinkling stars. You can spot them, and come to know them as faithful friends, if you try.

From late January, and through mid-February, 5 bright planets were visible at once in the predawn sky. This image is from February 8, 2016. It’s by Eliot Herman in Tucson, Arizona. View on Flickr.

Bottom line: In August 2016, Jupiter starts out the month above Mercury and Venus in the western evening sky. Toward the end of the month, Venus climbs above Mercury and then Jupiter. Saturn and the bright star Antares make a triangle with Mars on the sky’s dome, shining from dusk until late night.

Easily locate stars and constellations with EarthSky’s planisphere.

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from EarthSky http://ift.tt/IJfHCr

Skywatcher, by Predrag Agatonovic.

All five bright planets start out as evening objects in September 2016, but two are hard to see. Mercury and Jupiter are quickly fading into the glare of sunset, and will move into the morning sky later this month. Venus, Mars and Saturn adorn the evening sky all through September. Venus is up just after sunset (setting before nightfall at northerly latitudes or shortly after dark in the Southern Hemisphere). The other two evening planets – Mars and Saturn – stay out until late evening at mid-northern latitudes (or until midnight or beyond as seen from the Southern Hemisphere). Mars is still bright, forming a noticeable triangle on the sky’s dome with Saturn and the bright star Antares. Follow the links below to learn more about September planets in 2016.

Brilliant Venus sets at dusk or early evening

Mercury in morning sky by late September

Jupiter shifts from evening to morning sky

Mars, dusk until mid-to-late evening, shines near Saturn

Saturn, dusk until mid-to-late evening, shines near Mars

Like what EarthSky offers? Sign up for our free daily newsletter today!

Astronomy events, star parties, festivals, workshops

Visit a new EarthSky feature – Best Places to Stargaze – and add your fav.

On September 2, 2016, the moon is near Jupiter, low in the west after sunset. Venus, 3rd-brightest sky object after sun and moon, might be your ticket to finding Jupiter (4th-brightest sky object). Or you might spot the moon first that night. From very northerly latitudes, bring your binoculars. The moon and Jupiter will be exceedingly near the sunset.

By September 3, 2016, the moon will be easy to see from all parts of Earth. It’ll still be near Venus and Jupiter, shortly after sunset. Look west!

On September 4, 5 and 6, the bow of the waxing crescent moon points toward the planets Venus and Jupiter. This month, Jupiter quickly falls into the glare of sunset while Venus slowly but surely climbs away. Read more.

Brilliant Venus sets at dusk or early evening . People have been reporting sightings of the brightest planet, Venus, in the west after sunset. It’s rather low in the twilight glare, but surprisingly bright for being so close to the horizon. Everyone on Earth has a shot at seeing it, but it’s easier from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere.

Watch for Venus near the moon on September 3. Binoculars will enhance the view!

Venus will become easier to see in the western evening sky in October, and even more so in November.

By the way, when Venus passed behind the sun in June, it passed directly behind it, as seen from Earth. That happened on June 6, 2016, and at that time Venus officially transitioned from our morning to our evening sky. Exactly four years previous to Venus’ passing directly behind the sun on June 6, 2016, Venus swung directly in front of the sun on June 6, 2012. You might remember that event: the widely watched transit of Venus, during which Venus crossed the sun’s face as seen from Earth (see photos). It was the last transit of Venus until December 11, 2117.

Here’s Venus, caught from a plane over southern Oregon, on July 28, 2016. Notice the bright twilight background. Photo by Gemini Brett.

The bow of the waning crescent moon points toward Mercury’s place over the sunrise point on the horizon. Mercury is more easily viewed in the Northern Hemisphere. Read more.

Mercury in morning sky by late September. Although Mercury may still be visible as an evening object from the Southern Hemisphere in early September, this fleet-footed planet will move out of the evening sky and into the morning sky by mid-September 2016. Mercury will swing to its greatest morning elongation from the sun on September 28, to present a fine morning apparition of Mercury in the Northern Hemisphere (and not so good for the Southern Hemisphere).

Fortunately, the waning crescent moon can help you locate Mercury at and near its greatest morning elongation on September 27, September 28 and September 29.

From northerly latitudes, Mercury may remain visible before sunrise for the first week or two during October 2016. If you are blessed with clear skies, you might even see the conjunction of Mercury and Jupiter on the morning of October 11, 2016. See the sky chart below.

How many of you will see Mercury and Jupiter snuggling up together before sunrise on or near October 11, 2016?

Click here for recommended almanacs; they can give you Mercury’s rising time in your sky.

Look for the moon near Jupiter on August 5 and August 6. Binoculars could come in handy. The green line depicts the ecliptic – Earth’s orbital plane projected on the great dome of sky.

Jupiter shifts from evening to morning sky. From around the world, Jupiter quickly fades into the sunset and, for the most part, is lost in the glare of the sun throughout the month. Your best chance of spotting Jupiter this month is in the evening sky during the first few days of September. Southerly latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere are favored for seeing the last vestiges of Jupiter as an evening “star.”

If you are blessed with an unobstructed horizon in the direction of sunset, and crystal-clear skies, you might catch the young waxing crescent moon with Jupiter on or near September 2. the moon and Jupiter will be especially hard to see from northerly latitudes, so have binoculars handy!

Venus, the third-brightest celestial object, after sun and moon, may be your ticket to finding Jupiter, the fourth-brightest celestial body. At northerly latitudes, you’ll probably need binoculars to view the moon and Jupiter on this date.

After Jupiter disappears from evening sky in early September, its reappearance in the morning sky will come sometime in October 2016.

View larger | Mikhail Chubarets in the Ukraine made this chart. It shows the view of Mars through a telescope in 2016. We never see Mars as a disk like this with the eye alone. But you can see why Mars has been so bright to the eye in 2016.

Look for the moon near Saturn, Antares and Mars as darkness falls on September 7, 8 and 9. Read more.

Mars, dusk until mid-to-late evening, shines near Saturn. Mars is still bright this month, though fainter than it was earlier in 2016! Saturn came closest to Earth for the year on June 3, less than four days after Mars’ closest approach to Earth on May 30. Although Mars and Saturn are beginning to fade a bit, they’re still plenty bright and easy to see – especially Mars!

Mars was at its brightest at its opposition on May 22. Although Mars has faded since its glory days in May and June 2016, Mars is nonetheless respectably bright, shining on par with the sky’s brightest stars.

Looking for a sky almanac? EarthSky recommends…

Here’s some really good news, though. Mars is near another planet on the sky’s dome, Saturn. Look for Mars and Saturn near Antares, the brightest star in the constellation Scorpius the Scorpion. They make a noticeable triangle on the sky’s dome.

Let the moon help guide your eye to Mars (plus Saturn and the bright star Antares) for several evenings, centered on or near September 9.

Use the moon on to find the colorful threesome – Mars, Saturn and Antares – on September 8. Read more.

Saturn, dusk until mid-to-late evening, shines near Saturn. Both Mars and Saturn are near a fainter object – still one of the sky’s brightest stars – Antares in the constellation Scorpius.

The ringed planet starts out the month appearing in the southwest sky at nightfall. Although Saturn appears respectably bright, its brilliance can’t match that of Mars. Look for Saturn near Mars, even though Mars moves farther away from Saturn (and the star Antares) all month long. These two worlds form a bright celestial triangle with the star Antares in the September night sky. Mars is brighter than Saturn, which in turn is brighter than Antares.

Watch for the moon to swing by Saturn for several days, centered on or near September 8.

Saturn, the farthest world that you can easily view with the eye alone, appears golden in color. It shines with a steady light. Binoculars don’t reveal Saturn’s gorgeous rings, by the way, although binoculars will enhance Saturn’s golden color. To see the rings, you need a small telescope. A telescope will also reveal one or more of Saturn’s many moons, most notably Titan.

Tom Wildoner over-exposed Saturn itself to capture this view of Saturn’s moons on June 25, 2016. Visit Tom at LeisurelyScientist.com.

Contrasting the size of Saturn and its rings with our planet Earth via Hubble Heritage Team.

Saturn’s rings are inclined at a little more than 26^o from edge-on in August 2016, exhibiting their northern face. Next year, in October 2017, the rings will open most widely, displaying a maximum inclination of 27^o.

As with so much in space (and on Earth), the appearance of Saturn’s rings from Earth is cyclical. In the year 2025, the rings will appear edge-on as seen from Earth. After that, we’ll begin to see the south side of Saturn’s rings, to increase to a maximum inclination of 27^o by May 2032.

Click here for recommended almanacs. They can help you know when the planets rise, transit and set in your sky

What do we mean by bright planet? By bright planet, we mean any solar system planet that is easily visible without an optical aid and that has been watched by our ancestors since time immemorial. In their outward order from the sun, the five bright planets are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. These planets actually do appear bright in our sky. They are typically as bright as – or brighter than – the brightest stars. Plus, these relatively nearby worlds tend to shine with a steadier light than the distant, twinkling stars. You can spot them, and come to know them as faithful friends, if you try.

From late January, and through mid-February, 5 bright planets were visible at once in the predawn sky. This image is from February 8, 2016. It’s by Eliot Herman in Tucson, Arizona. View on Flickr.

Bottom line: In August 2016, Jupiter starts out the month above Mercury and Venus in the western evening sky. Toward the end of the month, Venus climbs above Mercury and then Jupiter. Saturn and the bright star Antares make a triangle with Mars on the sky’s dome, shining from dusk until late night.

Easily locate stars and constellations with EarthSky’s planisphere.

Don’t miss anything. Subscribe to EarthSky News by email

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Clean Energy in a Revitalized Spartanburg

Re-posted from the White House Blog

By Rohan Patel

Vulnerable communities around the country are transforming their neighborhoods through collaborative partnerships. When their voices, ideas, and visions are honored, amazing things can happen.

Almost 20 years ago, residents in Spartanburg, South Carolina, began to formulate their vision for change. It started with assistance from EPA’s regional office in Atlanta, when the community discovered the sources of public health and environmental problems in their neighborhoods. As a former mill town, Spartanburg had faced disinvestment for many years. As manufacturing facilities shut down, a 30 acre dump site and a three acre site with leaking underground storage tanks was left behind, exposing residents to toxic air and water pollution.

But that wasn’t the end of the story of Spartanburg; it was the beginning of the revitalization and renewal of the community. In 1997, longtime resident Harold Mitchell prompted EPA to investigate the causes of rare cancers and respiratory diseases that were affecting his family, friends, and neighbors in Spartanburg. The link to the legacy of pollution from years past became clear. Mitchell soon founded a program called ReGenisis to address these significant environmental concerns and to reverse the blight, disinvestment, and hopelessness impacting the neighborhood.

Over the last 20 years ReGenesis has led a collaborative and transformational effort to revive Spartanburg. It started with a $20,000 EPA environmental justice small grant, a program that has provided over $24 million to over 1,400 community-based organizations. Mr. Mitchell and his community members did something extraordinary – they leveraged that $20,000 into more than $300 million in public and private funding to turn things around. With investments from federal, state, and local government, as well as private foundations, ReGenisis spearheaded the effort to clean up the Superfund sites, bring in 500 affordable housing units, six health clinics, job training programs and many other amenities that sparked far-reaching positive changes in Spartanburg. This model inspired EPA to develop its Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) Model and subsequent CPS grant program.

Today, I had the opportunity to participate in the first Clean Energy Savings for All Summit to highlight one of the crowning achievements of the revitalization effort in Spartanburg: the Arkwright Solar Farm, which is being built directly on top of one of the Superfund sites that was responsible for environmental contamination in the community. It’s a powerful symbol of the transformation that has happened in these communities. What once was a source of pollution and blight, the former Arkwright landfill is now being covered with 12,000 solar panels that will bring jobs and a source of clean energy that can power almost 500 homes in the surrounding neighborhoods.

For authentic and sustainable change to happen, it must be driven by communities. The story of Spartanburg is a lesson in how government can partner with communities, empower them to find solutions to their problems, and develop innovative and collaborative strategies to make them a reality. The solar farm is the latest chapter in the story of the revitalization of Spartanburg, and we are excited to continue to raise awareness of these examples so other communities across the country can follow the path from surviving to thriving.

About the author Rohan Patel: Special Assistant to the President, Deputy Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, and Senior Advisor for Climate and Energy Policy.

from The EPA Blog http://ift.tt/2bCbdqw

Re-posted from the White House Blog

By Rohan Patel

Vulnerable communities around the country are transforming their neighborhoods through collaborative partnerships. When their voices, ideas, and visions are honored, amazing things can happen.

Almost 20 years ago, residents in Spartanburg, South Carolina, began to formulate their vision for change. It started with assistance from EPA’s regional office in Atlanta, when the community discovered the sources of public health and environmental problems in their neighborhoods. As a former mill town, Spartanburg had faced disinvestment for many years. As manufacturing facilities shut down, a 30 acre dump site and a three acre site with leaking underground storage tanks was left behind, exposing residents to toxic air and water pollution.

But that wasn’t the end of the story of Spartanburg; it was the beginning of the revitalization and renewal of the community. In 1997, longtime resident Harold Mitchell prompted EPA to investigate the causes of rare cancers and respiratory diseases that were affecting his family, friends, and neighbors in Spartanburg. The link to the legacy of pollution from years past became clear. Mitchell soon founded a program called ReGenisis to address these significant environmental concerns and to reverse the blight, disinvestment, and hopelessness impacting the neighborhood.

Over the last 20 years ReGenesis has led a collaborative and transformational effort to revive Spartanburg. It started with a $20,000 EPA environmental justice small grant, a program that has provided over $24 million to over 1,400 community-based organizations. Mr. Mitchell and his community members did something extraordinary – they leveraged that $20,000 into more than $300 million in public and private funding to turn things around. With investments from federal, state, and local government, as well as private foundations, ReGenisis spearheaded the effort to clean up the Superfund sites, bring in 500 affordable housing units, six health clinics, job training programs and many other amenities that sparked far-reaching positive changes in Spartanburg. This model inspired EPA to develop its Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) Model and subsequent CPS grant program.

Today, I had the opportunity to participate in the first Clean Energy Savings for All Summit to highlight one of the crowning achievements of the revitalization effort in Spartanburg: the Arkwright Solar Farm, which is being built directly on top of one of the Superfund sites that was responsible for environmental contamination in the community. It’s a powerful symbol of the transformation that has happened in these communities. What once was a source of pollution and blight, the former Arkwright landfill is now being covered with 12,000 solar panels that will bring jobs and a source of clean energy that can power almost 500 homes in the surrounding neighborhoods.

For authentic and sustainable change to happen, it must be driven by communities. The story of Spartanburg is a lesson in how government can partner with communities, empower them to find solutions to their problems, and develop innovative and collaborative strategies to make them a reality. The solar farm is the latest chapter in the story of the revitalization of Spartanburg, and we are excited to continue to raise awareness of these examples so other communities across the country can follow the path from surviving to thriving.

About the author Rohan Patel: Special Assistant to the President, Deputy Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, and Senior Advisor for Climate and Energy Policy.

from The EPA Blog http://ift.tt/2bCbdqw

Moyhu: climate feedbacks and circuits [Stoat]

There’s a vair nice post at Moyhu called climate feedbacks and circuits.

I think it is particaulrly nice that someone competent has finally taken and shaken the gibberish about feedbacks that the EE’s fling about so thoughtlessly and actually made some sense of it.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2c5g7sD

There’s a vair nice post at Moyhu called climate feedbacks and circuits.

I think it is particaulrly nice that someone competent has finally taken and shaken the gibberish about feedbacks that the EE’s fling about so thoughtlessly and actually made some sense of it.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2c5g7sD

EPA and the new TSCA – Stakeholders push agency in divergent directions [The Pump Handle]

As the U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) begins work under the Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act for the 21^st Century (LCSA) – the updated Toxic Substances Control Act – more striking divisions are emerging between what environmental health advocates and what chemical manufacturing and industry groups want from the law.

These go beyond what was voiced during the public meetings the EPA held in early August to gather input on the rules it will use to prioritize chemicals for review and evaluate those chemicals’ risks. A look at the written comments now submitted to the agency underscores how important these decisions will be. Depending on what the EPA decides, the LCSA could either usher in a new era of public health protections – or it could reinforce and perhaps further entrench the status quo.

Altogether, more than 100 written comments have now been submitted to the EPA on both rules. In raw number of comments submitted, the industrial interest groups and environmental health advocates are currently nearly equally divided. [This could change as more comments are posted to the EPA online docket for the risk evaluation rule.] There are very few comments from apparently unaffiliated citizens, all submitted anonymously. But this is where the parity ends.

Will EPA limit or expand how exposures are considered?

Among the most striking differences between environmental health advocates and industry groups is how they would like EPA to assess chemical exposures. The American Academy of Pediatrics weighed in on the information needed to adequately protect children, reminding the EPA that “Children are not little adults.” In comments to which more than three dozen environmental, health and labor advocacy groups signed on, the EPA was urged to protect fence-line communities. In its comments, Alaska Community Action on Toxics highlighted the importance of how EPA will consider Arctic and other disproportionately exposed communities.

Meanwhile, various industry groups, including the Consumer Specialty Product Association (CSPA) expressed concern about a broad interpretation of the law’s direction to specially consider those who may be most vulnerable to chemical exposures. In its comments, the CSPA asks the EPA to clarify what the law’s means by describing these groups “potentially exposed” and how that differs from “an actual exposure.” Similarly, the International Fragrance Association North America asked that EPA find “some reasonable potential for greater risk” when considering susceptible populations, rather than simply considering those who are more exposed than others. This slicing and dicing could create obstacles for the EPA’s consideration of communities with heavy toxic exposures if it means having to prove individuals’ personal risk factors and specific exposure levels – rather than looking at a community as a whole.

Another point of divergence concerns the scope of the science that stakeholders want the agency to use in prioritizing and evaluating chemicals. The balance of industry and academic science appears to be shaping up as an area of contention, as noted in comments from the Endocrine Society. So does the potential confidentiality of information industry submits to EPA. The American Chemistry Council wants to EPA to explain how it will “protect confidential information during the prioritization process.”

Yet another is various industry groups’ focus on individual chemicals they would like to see designated low priority. This contrasts with the request from numerous environmental health advocates that EPA evaluate groups of similar chemicals together to avoid the single chemical approach that has facilitated so-called “regrettable substitutions” – as has happened with flame retardants.

How will EPA consider highly hazardous chemicals used in manufacturing?

For example, when it comes to worker exposure, the Vinyl Institute has written to the EPA explaining that the primary chemicals used to make vinyl – ethylene chloride, a neurotoxin and potential carcinogen and vinyl chloride monomer, a known human carcinogen – “should be considered as industrial intermediates, with little to no widespread public exposure.” The implication is that given existing regulation of these substances, these chemicals shouldn’t rise to the level of high priority under the Lautenberg Act.

On the other hand, the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Toxic Use Reduction Institute (TURI) in its comments says:

“In considering chemical intermediates, it is important to consider the potential for occupational or public exposure during accidents or process malfunctions. Experience has shown that it is important not to assume an absence of exposure potential. For example, methyl isocyanate, a source of severe toxic exposures in the Bhopal disaster, is used as a chemical intermediate for the production of carbamate insecticides and herbicides.”

And the AFL-CIO points out that workers

“often are exposed to chemicals earlier in the supply chain” and are “are known for experiencing sentinel exposures because they often are the first to be exposed to a chemical, to higher levels of a chemical and throughout the duration of their working lives.”

The EPA, wrote the union, must

“consider occupational factors that make working populations susceptible to toxicity” throughout its chemical prioritization and evaluation process, “not simply consider occupational uses after chemicals are selected based only on non-occupational factors.”

Occupational diseases caused by chemical exposures, notes the AFL-CIO, “are responsible for more than 50,000 deaths and 190,000 illnesses each year.”

The public will have another chance to weigh in after the EPA releases these proposed rules, which Congress directed EPA to issue by mid-December.

 

 

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2cftR67

As the U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) begins work under the Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act for the 21^st Century (LCSA) – the updated Toxic Substances Control Act – more striking divisions are emerging between what environmental health advocates and what chemical manufacturing and industry groups want from the law.

These go beyond what was voiced during the public meetings the EPA held in early August to gather input on the rules it will use to prioritize chemicals for review and evaluate those chemicals’ risks. A look at the written comments now submitted to the agency underscores how important these decisions will be. Depending on what the EPA decides, the LCSA could either usher in a new era of public health protections – or it could reinforce and perhaps further entrench the status quo.

Altogether, more than 100 written comments have now been submitted to the EPA on both rules. In raw number of comments submitted, the industrial interest groups and environmental health advocates are currently nearly equally divided. [This could change as more comments are posted to the EPA online docket for the risk evaluation rule.] There are very few comments from apparently unaffiliated citizens, all submitted anonymously. But this is where the parity ends.

Will EPA limit or expand how exposures are considered?

Among the most striking differences between environmental health advocates and industry groups is how they would like EPA to assess chemical exposures. The American Academy of Pediatrics weighed in on the information needed to adequately protect children, reminding the EPA that “Children are not little adults.” In comments to which more than three dozen environmental, health and labor advocacy groups signed on, the EPA was urged to protect fence-line communities. In its comments, Alaska Community Action on Toxics highlighted the importance of how EPA will consider Arctic and other disproportionately exposed communities.

Meanwhile, various industry groups, including the Consumer Specialty Product Association (CSPA) expressed concern about a broad interpretation of the law’s direction to specially consider those who may be most vulnerable to chemical exposures. In its comments, the CSPA asks the EPA to clarify what the law’s means by describing these groups “potentially exposed” and how that differs from “an actual exposure.” Similarly, the International Fragrance Association North America asked that EPA find “some reasonable potential for greater risk” when considering susceptible populations, rather than simply considering those who are more exposed than others. This slicing and dicing could create obstacles for the EPA’s consideration of communities with heavy toxic exposures if it means having to prove individuals’ personal risk factors and specific exposure levels – rather than looking at a community as a whole.

Another point of divergence concerns the scope of the science that stakeholders want the agency to use in prioritizing and evaluating chemicals. The balance of industry and academic science appears to be shaping up as an area of contention, as noted in comments from the Endocrine Society. So does the potential confidentiality of information industry submits to EPA. The American Chemistry Council wants to EPA to explain how it will “protect confidential information during the prioritization process.”

Yet another is various industry groups’ focus on individual chemicals they would like to see designated low priority. This contrasts with the request from numerous environmental health advocates that EPA evaluate groups of similar chemicals together to avoid the single chemical approach that has facilitated so-called “regrettable substitutions” – as has happened with flame retardants.

How will EPA consider highly hazardous chemicals used in manufacturing?

For example, when it comes to worker exposure, the Vinyl Institute has written to the EPA explaining that the primary chemicals used to make vinyl – ethylene chloride, a neurotoxin and potential carcinogen and vinyl chloride monomer, a known human carcinogen – “should be considered as industrial intermediates, with little to no widespread public exposure.” The implication is that given existing regulation of these substances, these chemicals shouldn’t rise to the level of high priority under the Lautenberg Act.

On the other hand, the University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Toxic Use Reduction Institute (TURI) in its comments says:

“In considering chemical intermediates, it is important to consider the potential for occupational or public exposure during accidents or process malfunctions. Experience has shown that it is important not to assume an absence of exposure potential. For example, methyl isocyanate, a source of severe toxic exposures in the Bhopal disaster, is used as a chemical intermediate for the production of carbamate insecticides and herbicides.”

And the AFL-CIO points out that workers

“often are exposed to chemicals earlier in the supply chain” and are “are known for experiencing sentinel exposures because they often are the first to be exposed to a chemical, to higher levels of a chemical and throughout the duration of their working lives.”

The EPA, wrote the union, must

“consider occupational factors that make working populations susceptible to toxicity” throughout its chemical prioritization and evaluation process, “not simply consider occupational uses after chemicals are selected based only on non-occupational factors.”

Occupational diseases caused by chemical exposures, notes the AFL-CIO, “are responsible for more than 50,000 deaths and 190,000 illnesses each year.”

The public will have another chance to weigh in after the EPA releases these proposed rules, which Congress directed EPA to issue by mid-December.

 

 

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2cftR67

Watch spacewalk live September 1

NASA astronaut Barry Wilmore outside the International Space Station during February 2015 spacewalk. Fellow spacewalker Terry Virts, seen reflected in the visor, shared this photograph on social media. Image via NASA

On Thursday, September 1, 2016, two NASA astronauts – Jeff Williams and Kate Rubins – will spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) for the second time in less than two weeks. NASA TV will provide complete coverage beginning at 6:30 a.m. EDT (1030 UTC). The spacewalk is scheduled to begin about 8 a.m. EDT (1200 UTC) and last six and half hours. Translate to your timezone.

Watch here.

Here is what the astronauts will be doing during the spacewalk, according to a NASA statement:

Working on the port side of the orbiting complex’s backbone, or truss, Expedition 48 Commander Jeff Williams and Flight Engineer Kate Rubins of NASA will retract a thermal radiator that is part of the station’s cooling system. The radiator is a backup that had been deployed previously as part of an effort to fix an ammonia coolant leak. They’ll also tighten struts on a solar array joint, and install the first of several enhanced high-definition television cameras that will be used to monitor activities outside the station, including the comings and goings of visiting cargo and crew vehicles.

The Thursday spacewalk will be the fifth of Williams’ career and the second for Rubins. Williams will be designated as extravehicular crew member 1 (EV1), wearing a spacesuit with a red stripe. Rubins will be EV2, wearing a suit with no stripes.

Bottom line: Two ISS astronauts will perform a 6.5 hour spacewalk beginning at about 8:00 a.m. ET (12:00 UTC) Thursday, September 1, 2016. NASA TV will broadcast live coverage.

Read more from NASA

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2bJGG6b

NASA astronaut Barry Wilmore outside the International Space Station during February 2015 spacewalk. Fellow spacewalker Terry Virts, seen reflected in the visor, shared this photograph on social media. Image via NASA

On Thursday, September 1, 2016, two NASA astronauts – Jeff Williams and Kate Rubins – will spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) for the second time in less than two weeks. NASA TV will provide complete coverage beginning at 6:30 a.m. EDT (1030 UTC). The spacewalk is scheduled to begin about 8 a.m. EDT (1200 UTC) and last six and half hours. Translate to your timezone.

Watch here.

Here is what the astronauts will be doing during the spacewalk, according to a NASA statement:

Working on the port side of the orbiting complex’s backbone, or truss, Expedition 48 Commander Jeff Williams and Flight Engineer Kate Rubins of NASA will retract a thermal radiator that is part of the station’s cooling system. The radiator is a backup that had been deployed previously as part of an effort to fix an ammonia coolant leak. They’ll also tighten struts on a solar array joint, and install the first of several enhanced high-definition television cameras that will be used to monitor activities outside the station, including the comings and goings of visiting cargo and crew vehicles.

The Thursday spacewalk will be the fifth of Williams’ career and the second for Rubins. Williams will be designated as extravehicular crew member 1 (EV1), wearing a spacesuit with a red stripe. Rubins will be EV2, wearing a suit with no stripes.

Bottom line: Two ISS astronauts will perform a 6.5 hour spacewalk beginning at about 8:00 a.m. ET (12:00 UTC) Thursday, September 1, 2016. NASA TV will broadcast live coverage.

Read more from NASA

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2bJGG6b

A closer look at climate change. And denial. LOL. [Greg Laden's Blog]

Seth Myers:

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2bCLg7l

Seth Myers:

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2bCLg7l

Cancer resistance developing in Tasmanian devils [Life Lines]

Physics Blogging Round-Up: Fast Cars and Spherical Cows [Uncertain Principles]

It’s been a while since the last Forbes links dump, but since it’s the last day of the month, I figure I might as well sum up a bit. Only two posts, but they have a connection that I’ll expound on a bit to make up for the lack of material…

— Can A Tesla Model S Really Accelerate Faster Than Gravity?: I got pointed to a story about the 0-60mph time for a Tesla, and said “That seems fishy…” After climbing back out of the Google rabbit hole, I tried to explain why that seemed unlikely to me, and the funny timing thing that might explain the result.

— The Hardest Thing To Grasp In Physics? Thinking Like A Physicist: Some musings about how the trickiest part of learning to be a physicist is getting the mindset, particularly the highly reductionist use of “spherical cow” sorts of approximations.

So, the first of these really pissed off a lot of Car Guys, who left tons of comments, and some angry emails and tweets, pointing to a variety of other cars that supposedly accelerate at large multiples of the acceleration of gravity. I wasn’t especially moved by most of this, in part because they’re not particularly relevant to the question of whether the Tesla result is surprising. It’s true that I didn’t discuss the possibility of aerodynamic down forces that would allow for a larger frictional force, but those aren’t actually important for a normal-ish car like a Tesla. A top fuel dragster is a completely different animal, and I’m not especially surprised that they work differently than an ordinary car.

The other issue I have with the angry reaction is that it really misses the point of the post (which, admittedly, I probably should’ve made more explicit). That is, I don’t actually care whether the Tesla accelerates at 0.98g or 1.1g. My purpose in writing that piece, like most of what I write, really had more to do with the physics mindset than the specific numerical values. I was explaining my reaction and reasoning: when I read the original piece, I was immediately skeptical for reasons that have to do with physics, which sent me off looking for more information that might explain the faster-than-expected time in a way that didn’t require surprising physics, and learned about a timing thing that’s in the right ballpark to account for the apparent discrepancy.

I thought that was an interesting process (obviously, or I wouldn’t’ve been sucked into Googling stuff about car testing), and worth laying out. I’m really not remotely invested in the specific numerical results– if the tires they use turn out to be much stickier than the usual run of things so the acceleration is a little higher than I would expect, well, that’s a nice bit of trivia. It doesn’t really change my thinking about why that was a piece worth writing, which is largely that it illustrates the toy-model-building described in the second post. Thinking like a physicist means that the 0-60mph time isn’t just a random factoid that could take on absolutely any value, it’s something with a physical origin that you can model in a simple way, which leads to an expectation about what the time should be for a relatively ordinary car. And thinking “that’s funny…” does, in fact, lead to something that’s a little funny in the timing, which is also interesting.

But, yeah, I should’ve made that clearer, because, wow, are there people who are deeply invested in the accuracy of those numbers…

Anyway, that’s the story of my recent blogging. Which may become sparse for the next several months, as I’ve gotten myself stuck on a grand jury that sits two days a week, and classes start next Wednesday, so my time is going to be very tight for the immediate future.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2bR9vMS

It’s been a while since the last Forbes links dump, but since it’s the last day of the month, I figure I might as well sum up a bit. Only two posts, but they have a connection that I’ll expound on a bit to make up for the lack of material…

— Can A Tesla Model S Really Accelerate Faster Than Gravity?: I got pointed to a story about the 0-60mph time for a Tesla, and said “That seems fishy…” After climbing back out of the Google rabbit hole, I tried to explain why that seemed unlikely to me, and the funny timing thing that might explain the result.

— The Hardest Thing To Grasp In Physics? Thinking Like A Physicist: Some musings about how the trickiest part of learning to be a physicist is getting the mindset, particularly the highly reductionist use of “spherical cow” sorts of approximations.

So, the first of these really pissed off a lot of Car Guys, who left tons of comments, and some angry emails and tweets, pointing to a variety of other cars that supposedly accelerate at large multiples of the acceleration of gravity. I wasn’t especially moved by most of this, in part because they’re not particularly relevant to the question of whether the Tesla result is surprising. It’s true that I didn’t discuss the possibility of aerodynamic down forces that would allow for a larger frictional force, but those aren’t actually important for a normal-ish car like a Tesla. A top fuel dragster is a completely different animal, and I’m not especially surprised that they work differently than an ordinary car.

The other issue I have with the angry reaction is that it really misses the point of the post (which, admittedly, I probably should’ve made more explicit). That is, I don’t actually care whether the Tesla accelerates at 0.98g or 1.1g. My purpose in writing that piece, like most of what I write, really had more to do with the physics mindset than the specific numerical values. I was explaining my reaction and reasoning: when I read the original piece, I was immediately skeptical for reasons that have to do with physics, which sent me off looking for more information that might explain the faster-than-expected time in a way that didn’t require surprising physics, and learned about a timing thing that’s in the right ballpark to account for the apparent discrepancy.

I thought that was an interesting process (obviously, or I wouldn’t’ve been sucked into Googling stuff about car testing), and worth laying out. I’m really not remotely invested in the specific numerical results– if the tires they use turn out to be much stickier than the usual run of things so the acceleration is a little higher than I would expect, well, that’s a nice bit of trivia. It doesn’t really change my thinking about why that was a piece worth writing, which is largely that it illustrates the toy-model-building described in the second post. Thinking like a physicist means that the 0-60mph time isn’t just a random factoid that could take on absolutely any value, it’s something with a physical origin that you can model in a simple way, which leads to an expectation about what the time should be for a relatively ordinary car. And thinking “that’s funny…” does, in fact, lead to something that’s a little funny in the timing, which is also interesting.

But, yeah, I should’ve made that clearer, because, wow, are there people who are deeply invested in the accuracy of those numbers…

Anyway, that’s the story of my recent blogging. Which may become sparse for the next several months, as I’ve gotten myself stuck on a grand jury that sits two days a week, and classes start next Wednesday, so my time is going to be very tight for the immediate future.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2bR9vMS

A Young, Dusty, Disk-Bearing Star Debunks ‘Alien Megastructures’ Theory (Synopsis) [Starts With A Bang]

“Otherwise we are trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t exist with a system which doesn’t work.” -Philip K. Dick

When it comes to the now famous “Alien Megastructures” star, the observations didn’t add up. There were huge, irregular flux dips, but not a hint of infrared radiation that would indicate a circumstellar disk. Infrared radiation was the marker for a whole slew of indicators — planetary collision debris, warped, thick disks, cometary swarms — that could be the cause of such spectacular dips.

Image credit: Tabby Boyajian and her team of PlanetHunters, via http://ift.tt/1Pjgrmk.

Yet there are increasingly more and more stars that show these huge, irregular flux dips, and they all have a few things in common. They’re all young stars, they all emit infrared radiation, they all have circumstellar disks and they all show a variety of disk orientations with respect to our line-of-sight. Is it possible, just as we can’t see Saturn’s rings when they’re edge-on, that this mysterious star’s disk is edge-on, and that’s why we can’t see its infrared flux?

Artist’s conception of the extrasolar ring system circling the young giant planet or brown dwarf J1407b. Image credit: Ron Miller.

Go get the whole story on why alien megastructures are out, and a circumstellar disk, with either a warped inner disk or eccentric, cometary-like debris, is in!

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2c8zEHr

“Otherwise we are trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t exist with a system which doesn’t work.” -Philip K. Dick

When it comes to the now famous “Alien Megastructures” star, the observations didn’t add up. There were huge, irregular flux dips, but not a hint of infrared radiation that would indicate a circumstellar disk. Infrared radiation was the marker for a whole slew of indicators — planetary collision debris, warped, thick disks, cometary swarms — that could be the cause of such spectacular dips.

Image credit: Tabby Boyajian and her team of PlanetHunters, via http://ift.tt/1Pjgrmk.

Yet there are increasingly more and more stars that show these huge, irregular flux dips, and they all have a few things in common. They’re all young stars, they all emit infrared radiation, they all have circumstellar disks and they all show a variety of disk orientations with respect to our line-of-sight. Is it possible, just as we can’t see Saturn’s rings when they’re edge-on, that this mysterious star’s disk is edge-on, and that’s why we can’t see its infrared flux?

Artist’s conception of the extrasolar ring system circling the young giant planet or brown dwarf J1407b. Image credit: Ron Miller.

Go get the whole story on why alien megastructures are out, and a circumstellar disk, with either a warped inner disk or eccentric, cometary-like debris, is in!

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2c8zEHr

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (our Water Sources): Water Conservation and Reuse Grants

By Christina Burchette

Recycling isn’t just for paper and plastic—did you know that there are ways to recycle resources like water too? This practice is especially relevant and useful in places that have a long history of water scarcity.

From the Dust Bowl of the 1930s to the present, the United States has experienced significant periods of drought, so finding ways to conserve the available water supply and safely recycle it has already been a regional priority. However, the continued threat of water scarcity has consequences ranging from locally mandated water conservation and use restrictions, to increased food prices, to more severe wildfires—making new solutions and strategies all the more important to the health of local communities, ecosystems, and economies.

That’s why EPA is helping drought-prone areas achieve water supply resiliency by researching new ways to recycle and conserve water while also understanding how these conservation and reuse efforts affect ecological and human health.

Recently, EPA awarded Science to Achieve Results grants to five institutions that are researching the human and ecological health impacts associated with water reuse, reclaimed water applications, and conservation practices. Each institution is investigating different aspects of water reuse and their effects on the environment and public health. Researchers will measure and evaluate the impact of water conservation strategies, such as

• direct potable reuse, which is the process of reusing treated wastewater as drinking water without an environmental buffer;
• indirect potable reuse, where recycled water is blended with a natural water source to be treated for use as drinking water;
• aquifer recharge, where sites are constructed to collect stormwater so that it can infiltrate back into the ground; and
• agricultural water reuse, which is when treated wastewater is used to fertilize and irrigate crops.

The frequency, intensity, and duration of drought events only continues to increase as we see the impacts of climate change. This pattern is expected to continue and shift outside of historical trends, making forecasting our water supply and quality more difficult.

This STAR grant research will help us better understand the potential impacts of water recycling and conservation. The results will also help inform water utilities, communities, agricultural producers, and policy makers, and others with the information and solutions they need to make informed water management decisions, thereby helping drought impacted communities create healthy and sustainable water supplies.

To learn more about these grants, see the press release and visit the grant page.

About the Author: Christina Burchette is an Oak Ridge Associated Universities contractor and writer for the science communication team in EPA’s Office of Research and Development.

 

from The EPA Blog http://ift.tt/2bQTrdU

By Christina Burchette

Recycling isn’t just for paper and plastic—did you know that there are ways to recycle resources like water too? This practice is especially relevant and useful in places that have a long history of water scarcity.

From the Dust Bowl of the 1930s to the present, the United States has experienced significant periods of drought, so finding ways to conserve the available water supply and safely recycle it has already been a regional priority. However, the continued threat of water scarcity has consequences ranging from locally mandated water conservation and use restrictions, to increased food prices, to more severe wildfires—making new solutions and strategies all the more important to the health of local communities, ecosystems, and economies.

That’s why EPA is helping drought-prone areas achieve water supply resiliency by researching new ways to recycle and conserve water while also understanding how these conservation and reuse efforts affect ecological and human health.

Recently, EPA awarded Science to Achieve Results grants to five institutions that are researching the human and ecological health impacts associated with water reuse, reclaimed water applications, and conservation practices. Each institution is investigating different aspects of water reuse and their effects on the environment and public health. Researchers will measure and evaluate the impact of water conservation strategies, such as

• direct potable reuse, which is the process of reusing treated wastewater as drinking water without an environmental buffer;
• indirect potable reuse, where recycled water is blended with a natural water source to be treated for use as drinking water;
• aquifer recharge, where sites are constructed to collect stormwater so that it can infiltrate back into the ground; and
• agricultural water reuse, which is when treated wastewater is used to fertilize and irrigate crops.

The frequency, intensity, and duration of drought events only continues to increase as we see the impacts of climate change. This pattern is expected to continue and shift outside of historical trends, making forecasting our water supply and quality more difficult.

This STAR grant research will help us better understand the potential impacts of water recycling and conservation. The results will also help inform water utilities, communities, agricultural producers, and policy makers, and others with the information and solutions they need to make informed water management decisions, thereby helping drought impacted communities create healthy and sustainable water supplies.

To learn more about these grants, see the press release and visit the grant page.

About the Author: Christina Burchette is an Oak Ridge Associated Universities contractor and writer for the science communication team in EPA’s Office of Research and Development.

 

from The EPA Blog http://ift.tt/2bQTrdU

Federal oversight of Cal/OSHA – What is it good for? [The Pump Handle]

by Garrett Brown, MPH, CIH

If there is one thing that Christine Baker, Director of California’s Department of Industrial Relations (DIR), and Juliann Sum, Chief of the Division of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH or Cal/OSHA), cannot stand – it is criticism, no matter how constructive or gently offered it may be.

With a “thin skin” sensitivity and an aggressive impulse to counter-attack that rivals Donald Trump’s, Baker and Sum tend to go crazy about the annual report by Federal OSHA on the state of Cal/OSHA.  In July 2015, DIR/DOSH wrote two tart letters to federal OSHA (here, here) contesting the findings of the 2014 fiscal year report and the results of another federal OSHA (Feds) evaluation report.

Federal OSHA released this month their latest “Federal Annual Monitoring and Evaluation” (FAME) report for federal fiscal year 2015 (October 2014 through September 2015).  The 2015 FAME report actually notes improvements in areas where the Feds have previously highlighted program weaknesses.

Long experience here in California, and elsewhere, has shown public criticism and public pressure are critical to encouraging government enforcement agencies to meet their legal mandate and mission.  Holding political appointees’ feet to the fire – and the feet of the politicians that appointed them – month after month, year after year, is a critical element of ensuring that Cal/OSHA protects the health and safety of the state’s 19 million workers.

The continuing deficiencies highlighted in the latest FAME report give an indication of the underlying problems – chronic understaffing and lack of political will.  The federal report, however, cannot require Cal/OSHA to meet several requirements of state law that it is failing to do, despite the adverse impact on California workers’ welfare.

It is true that the FAME reports are not a perfect reflection of the state of Cal/OSHA.  The reports are generally issued two years after the start of the fiscal year they cover – meaning a lot can change between the end of the fiscal year and the time the report is issued.  There are also significant differences between DOSH and the Federal program which are not always accurately explained or even acknowledged by the federal staffers who write the report.

Moreover, it is undeniable that the Cal/OSHA program is “better” than the Federal one in several important respects:

• Cal/OSHA, like other states that operate their own OSHA programs, covers public employees – the Feds do not. In 24 states in which Federal OSHA has jurisdiction, public sector employees do not have the protections provided by OSHA to private sector workers;
• Cal/OSHA has a clear policy that the immigration status of workers in California is completely irrelevant to their rights enforced by Cal/OSHA (that is, all workers in the state enjoy Cal/OSHA protection regardless of their status) – the Feds policy is not so clear on paper and even less so in practice;
• Cal/OSHA has been able to periodically issue new regulations, including for hazards like outdoor heat and aerosol transmissible diseases, among others issues – the Feds’ efforts have been stymied;
• Cal/OSHA has been able to create new permissible exposure limits (PELs) for more chemicals and to update existing PELs – the Feds have not effectively challenged adverse court orders and employer opposition so outdated PELs from 1970 are still in place;
• Cal/OSHA’s civil penalties against employers who violate workplace health and safety regulations have been substantially higher than the Feds’ penalties (although that is now changing for the Feds, but none of the penalties mean much to large corporations). Moreover, Cal/OSHA retains more penalties in appeal proceedings than Fed OSHA.

Nevertheless, the FAME reports are useful because they are an independent, yearly evaluation of Cal/OSHA’s performance compared to a minimum set of benchmarks.  They are public documents that definitely capture the attention of the publicity-conscious DIR/DOSH leadership.

The challenge for Cal/OSHA has always been to obtain the resources and political will to actually implement a stronger program – and this is what the FAME reports highlight.

The Feds’ FY 2015 FAME reports positive progress in a number of areas at Cal/OSHA – and that’s a good thing.  DOSH’s budget and number of authorized positions have been increased; training of field compliance officers has expanded; DOSH has exceeded the target numbers (goals that it selected for itself) for the number of enforcement inspections; abatement of serious hazards has improved; increased targeted activity by the Process Safety Management (refineries and chemical plants) and High Hazard units has occurred; and outreach activities and publications were increased; and new regulations have been issued.

It is important to place this progress, and the reasons for it, in context.  The first term of the California Governor Jerry Brown’s Administration adopted an “austerity today, austerity tomorrow, austerity forever” approach to Cal/OSHA.  Jerry Brown inherited 195 Cal/OSHA field compliance officers from Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in January 2011.  By January 2013, the number of compliance officers in the field had declined to 167 – the lowest number in more than a decade.  After two years of battling DIR austerity and other employer-friendly policies, then Cal/OSHA Chief Ellen Widess was forced to resign in September 2013.  The current DOSH leadership was then placed in power.

But starting in late 2013, news media outlets in the state and nationally began covering the hollowing out of Cal/OSHA under Brown and Baker; in February 2014 a “CASPA” (“Complaint Against State Plan Administration”) was filed with Fed OSHA against DIR; in April 2014 a whistleblower complaint was filed against DIR with the California State Auditor; Fed OSHA itself began an investigation of DIR’s financial and management practices; and stakeholders expressed concern in statewide Advisory Committee meetings in 2014 and 2015 about the state of Cal/OSHA.

Fed OSHA issued very critical FAME reports for federal fiscal years 2013 and 2014, as well as a report on its investigation of the CASPA in 2015. Many of the findings and recommendations of the 2013 and 2014 FAME reports repeated earlier findings that had not been corrected by the Brown Administration.

So it was with this “motivation” that the DIR/DOSH leadership has finally arrived at a place in 2016 where most previous FAME findings have been addressed and progress is being made.

But it cannot be said that Cal/OSHA is meetings its legal mandates, let alone its mission and potential, even now.

The key to Cal/OSHA meeting its responsibilities is to have the field staff necessary to carry out Federal and state requirements.  As noted in the FAME report, Cal/OSHA has been authorized to hire 240 field compliance officers.  But a full year after funding for these positions was made part of the budget in July 2015, DOSH has only 199 field positions (206 nominal positions) filled and 38 vacancies, according to the official July 2016 organization charts.

The chronic understaffing is the underlying reason for several findings in the 2015 FAME report (pages 9-13) and the unmet requirements of state law:

• It took DOSH inspectors an average of 20.7 days to open a “non-serious” safety inspection based on a worker complaint. State law allows no more than 14 days to open these inspections.
• The “citation lapse time” in safety inspections (the time needed to issue citations after the opening of an inspection) was 40% higher than the national average – 60.6 days for DOSH compared to 42.8 days nationally.
• State law requires DOSH to conduct “follow-up inspections” of 20% of investigations where “Serious” citations are issued – but Cal/OSHA is unable to meet the state law.
• Cal/OSHA Policies & Procedures require DOSH to conduct inspections of 10% of the worksites where permits have been issued for work with asbestos, lead, in trenches or structure demolitions, but Cal/OSHA is unable to meet the state law.
• State law requires DOSH’s Mining & Tunneling (M&T) Unit to inspect tunnels under construction at least six times a year (every two months) during construction, but Cal/OSHA is unable to meet the state law. The M&T Unit now has half the field inspectors it did 15 years ago at a time when tunnel construction is on the upswing in California.

Cal/OSHA’s understaffing means  – and has meant for years now – that it is simply unable to meet all Federal benchmarks or all requirements of state law.  Since July 2015 all the DOSH field compliance vacancies have been fully funded.  The DIR/DOSH leadership has failed to fill them. “New, additional resources” for DOSH do not mean much if they are not actually used.

Another troubling finding of the most recent FAME report is that a review of randomly selected case files showed that in 11 of 36 inspection case files (30%) where there was a union in the work site, the union was never contacted by Cal/OSHA and had no involvement in the inspection – in violation of both state and federal law (page 14).  Moreover, in 22 of 205 reviewed inspections (11%), Cal/OSHA did not interview any worker in the inspected facility (page 15).

In a review of limited number of fatality inspection case files, the FAME report noted that “next-of-kin” letters were not sent to survivors of fatal accidents in 17% of the cases (page 3).  Another random file review found that in 14% of complaint-generated inspections, workers who had made complaints were not informed of the results of these inspections (page 10).

This lack of worker and union participation in enforcement inspections can only result in incomplete inspections that will not identify all hazards on site and require their correction, keeping workers at risk for no good reason.

The 2015 FAME report also noted that the total recordable case rate for construction increased by 17% during the time period of the audit compared to the 2012-14 average, from 4.1 cases per 100 full time workers to 4.8 cases (page 26).  DIR/DOSH leaders have claimed that California’s injury and illness statistics are better than national levels or other major industrial states, but this is untrue and cannot be used as a reason for failing to fill field compliance inspector vacancies.

The 2015 FAME report noted that only 7% of employer retaliation investigations were completed with 90 days (page D-4).  DIR’s Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE or the “Labor Commission”) is responsible for investigating reports by workers that their employers have discriminated against them for filing complaints with Cal/OSHA, including cases where workers have been fired and suffered other reprisals.

The average time required to complete a DLSE investigation was 422 days – one year and two months!  Of the worker complaints filed with DIR/DLSE during the audited year, only 21% were found to be “meritorious” while the other 80% were rejected or simply abandoned.

Another critical deficiency at Cal/OSHA not directly addressed in the FAME report has been a continuing lack of field inspectors who can speak a language other than English where approximately 5 million workers in California speak other languages, including many who speak no English at all.

The most recent roster of Cal/OSHA field staff who are receiving bilingual pay indicates only 26 field inspectors are fluent in Spanish and only three are fluent in Asian languages.

Public attention and public pressure over the last three years has paid off in improvements at Cal/OSHA.  However, there are underlying problems that have not been addressed, as noted in the most recent FAME report.  Whatever shortcomings the FAME reports have, it is important to keep shining a light on Cal/OSHA’s actual resources and performance.

A prerequisite for an effective workplace health and safety agency is having enough field enforcement inspectors to meet the requirements of federal and state laws.  California has not yet achieved that.  Staffing levels, of course, are not the only issue at Cal/OSHA, but it is the one that underlines many others.  The people who pay the cost for failure to use available resources and the consequent missed benchmarks are California’s 19 million workers,

Hiring inspectors is not an easy task in California’s inflexible and cumbersome civil service system – but if there was sufficient political will on the part of the Brown Administration and its appointees, this problem could be greatly reduced.  With sufficient political will, the DLSE anti-relation unit would have the staffing it needs to do its job.  With sufficient political will, unions and workers would not be left in the dark during and after on-site Cal/OSHA inspections.  With sufficient political will, special efforts to recruit and hire field staff who speak languages other than English could be undertaken.

Why a labor-backed Democratic Party administration apparently does not have the political will to achieve these goals is an interesting question.  It is one that needs more time and space for a fuller examination.

Garrett Brown is a certified industrial hygienist who worked for Cal/OSHA for 20 years as a field Compliance officer and then served as Special Assistant to the Chief of the Division before retiring in 2014.  He has also been the volunteer Coordinator of the Maquiladora Health & Safety Support Network since 1993.

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2c4uGwG

by Garrett Brown, MPH, CIH

If there is one thing that Christine Baker, Director of California’s Department of Industrial Relations (DIR), and Juliann Sum, Chief of the Division of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH or Cal/OSHA), cannot stand – it is criticism, no matter how constructive or gently offered it may be.

With a “thin skin” sensitivity and an aggressive impulse to counter-attack that rivals Donald Trump’s, Baker and Sum tend to go crazy about the annual report by Federal OSHA on the state of Cal/OSHA.  In July 2015, DIR/DOSH wrote two tart letters to federal OSHA (here, here) contesting the findings of the 2014 fiscal year report and the results of another federal OSHA (Feds) evaluation report.

Federal OSHA released this month their latest “Federal Annual Monitoring and Evaluation” (FAME) report for federal fiscal year 2015 (October 2014 through September 2015).  The 2015 FAME report actually notes improvements in areas where the Feds have previously highlighted program weaknesses.

Long experience here in California, and elsewhere, has shown public criticism and public pressure are critical to encouraging government enforcement agencies to meet their legal mandate and mission.  Holding political appointees’ feet to the fire – and the feet of the politicians that appointed them – month after month, year after year, is a critical element of ensuring that Cal/OSHA protects the health and safety of the state’s 19 million workers.

The continuing deficiencies highlighted in the latest FAME report give an indication of the underlying problems – chronic understaffing and lack of political will.  The federal report, however, cannot require Cal/OSHA to meet several requirements of state law that it is failing to do, despite the adverse impact on California workers’ welfare.

It is true that the FAME reports are not a perfect reflection of the state of Cal/OSHA.  The reports are generally issued two years after the start of the fiscal year they cover – meaning a lot can change between the end of the fiscal year and the time the report is issued.  There are also significant differences between DOSH and the Federal program which are not always accurately explained or even acknowledged by the federal staffers who write the report.

Moreover, it is undeniable that the Cal/OSHA program is “better” than the Federal one in several important respects:

• Cal/OSHA, like other states that operate their own OSHA programs, covers public employees – the Feds do not. In 24 states in which Federal OSHA has jurisdiction, public sector employees do not have the protections provided by OSHA to private sector workers;
• Cal/OSHA has a clear policy that the immigration status of workers in California is completely irrelevant to their rights enforced by Cal/OSHA (that is, all workers in the state enjoy Cal/OSHA protection regardless of their status) – the Feds policy is not so clear on paper and even less so in practice;
• Cal/OSHA has been able to periodically issue new regulations, including for hazards like outdoor heat and aerosol transmissible diseases, among others issues – the Feds’ efforts have been stymied;
• Cal/OSHA has been able to create new permissible exposure limits (PELs) for more chemicals and to update existing PELs – the Feds have not effectively challenged adverse court orders and employer opposition so outdated PELs from 1970 are still in place;
• Cal/OSHA’s civil penalties against employers who violate workplace health and safety regulations have been substantially higher than the Feds’ penalties (although that is now changing for the Feds, but none of the penalties mean much to large corporations). Moreover, Cal/OSHA retains more penalties in appeal proceedings than Fed OSHA.

Nevertheless, the FAME reports are useful because they are an independent, yearly evaluation of Cal/OSHA’s performance compared to a minimum set of benchmarks.  They are public documents that definitely capture the attention of the publicity-conscious DIR/DOSH leadership.

The challenge for Cal/OSHA has always been to obtain the resources and political will to actually implement a stronger program – and this is what the FAME reports highlight.

The Feds’ FY 2015 FAME reports positive progress in a number of areas at Cal/OSHA – and that’s a good thing.  DOSH’s budget and number of authorized positions have been increased; training of field compliance officers has expanded; DOSH has exceeded the target numbers (goals that it selected for itself) for the number of enforcement inspections; abatement of serious hazards has improved; increased targeted activity by the Process Safety Management (refineries and chemical plants) and High Hazard units has occurred; and outreach activities and publications were increased; and new regulations have been issued.

It is important to place this progress, and the reasons for it, in context.  The first term of the California Governor Jerry Brown’s Administration adopted an “austerity today, austerity tomorrow, austerity forever” approach to Cal/OSHA.  Jerry Brown inherited 195 Cal/OSHA field compliance officers from Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in January 2011.  By January 2013, the number of compliance officers in the field had declined to 167 – the lowest number in more than a decade.  After two years of battling DIR austerity and other employer-friendly policies, then Cal/OSHA Chief Ellen Widess was forced to resign in September 2013.  The current DOSH leadership was then placed in power.

But starting in late 2013, news media outlets in the state and nationally began covering the hollowing out of Cal/OSHA under Brown and Baker; in February 2014 a “CASPA” (“Complaint Against State Plan Administration”) was filed with Fed OSHA against DIR; in April 2014 a whistleblower complaint was filed against DIR with the California State Auditor; Fed OSHA itself began an investigation of DIR’s financial and management practices; and stakeholders expressed concern in statewide Advisory Committee meetings in 2014 and 2015 about the state of Cal/OSHA.

Fed OSHA issued very critical FAME reports for federal fiscal years 2013 and 2014, as well as a report on its investigation of the CASPA in 2015. Many of the findings and recommendations of the 2013 and 2014 FAME reports repeated earlier findings that had not been corrected by the Brown Administration.

So it was with this “motivation” that the DIR/DOSH leadership has finally arrived at a place in 2016 where most previous FAME findings have been addressed and progress is being made.

But it cannot be said that Cal/OSHA is meetings its legal mandates, let alone its mission and potential, even now.

The key to Cal/OSHA meeting its responsibilities is to have the field staff necessary to carry out Federal and state requirements.  As noted in the FAME report, Cal/OSHA has been authorized to hire 240 field compliance officers.  But a full year after funding for these positions was made part of the budget in July 2015, DOSH has only 199 field positions (206 nominal positions) filled and 38 vacancies, according to the official July 2016 organization charts.

The chronic understaffing is the underlying reason for several findings in the 2015 FAME report (pages 9-13) and the unmet requirements of state law:

• It took DOSH inspectors an average of 20.7 days to open a “non-serious” safety inspection based on a worker complaint. State law allows no more than 14 days to open these inspections.
• The “citation lapse time” in safety inspections (the time needed to issue citations after the opening of an inspection) was 40% higher than the national average – 60.6 days for DOSH compared to 42.8 days nationally.
• State law requires DOSH to conduct “follow-up inspections” of 20% of investigations where “Serious” citations are issued – but Cal/OSHA is unable to meet the state law.
• Cal/OSHA Policies & Procedures require DOSH to conduct inspections of 10% of the worksites where permits have been issued for work with asbestos, lead, in trenches or structure demolitions, but Cal/OSHA is unable to meet the state law.
• State law requires DOSH’s Mining & Tunneling (M&T) Unit to inspect tunnels under construction at least six times a year (every two months) during construction, but Cal/OSHA is unable to meet the state law. The M&T Unit now has half the field inspectors it did 15 years ago at a time when tunnel construction is on the upswing in California.

Cal/OSHA’s understaffing means  – and has meant for years now – that it is simply unable to meet all Federal benchmarks or all requirements of state law.  Since July 2015 all the DOSH field compliance vacancies have been fully funded.  The DIR/DOSH leadership has failed to fill them. “New, additional resources” for DOSH do not mean much if they are not actually used.

Another troubling finding of the most recent FAME report is that a review of randomly selected case files showed that in 11 of 36 inspection case files (30%) where there was a union in the work site, the union was never contacted by Cal/OSHA and had no involvement in the inspection – in violation of both state and federal law (page 14).  Moreover, in 22 of 205 reviewed inspections (11%), Cal/OSHA did not interview any worker in the inspected facility (page 15).

In a review of limited number of fatality inspection case files, the FAME report noted that “next-of-kin” letters were not sent to survivors of fatal accidents in 17% of the cases (page 3).  Another random file review found that in 14% of complaint-generated inspections, workers who had made complaints were not informed of the results of these inspections (page 10).

This lack of worker and union participation in enforcement inspections can only result in incomplete inspections that will not identify all hazards on site and require their correction, keeping workers at risk for no good reason.

The 2015 FAME report also noted that the total recordable case rate for construction increased by 17% during the time period of the audit compared to the 2012-14 average, from 4.1 cases per 100 full time workers to 4.8 cases (page 26).  DIR/DOSH leaders have claimed that California’s injury and illness statistics are better than national levels or other major industrial states, but this is untrue and cannot be used as a reason for failing to fill field compliance inspector vacancies.

The 2015 FAME report noted that only 7% of employer retaliation investigations were completed with 90 days (page D-4).  DIR’s Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE or the “Labor Commission”) is responsible for investigating reports by workers that their employers have discriminated against them for filing complaints with Cal/OSHA, including cases where workers have been fired and suffered other reprisals.

The average time required to complete a DLSE investigation was 422 days – one year and two months!  Of the worker complaints filed with DIR/DLSE during the audited year, only 21% were found to be “meritorious” while the other 80% were rejected or simply abandoned.

Another critical deficiency at Cal/OSHA not directly addressed in the FAME report has been a continuing lack of field inspectors who can speak a language other than English where approximately 5 million workers in California speak other languages, including many who speak no English at all.

The most recent roster of Cal/OSHA field staff who are receiving bilingual pay indicates only 26 field inspectors are fluent in Spanish and only three are fluent in Asian languages.

Public attention and public pressure over the last three years has paid off in improvements at Cal/OSHA.  However, there are underlying problems that have not been addressed, as noted in the most recent FAME report.  Whatever shortcomings the FAME reports have, it is important to keep shining a light on Cal/OSHA’s actual resources and performance.

A prerequisite for an effective workplace health and safety agency is having enough field enforcement inspectors to meet the requirements of federal and state laws.  California has not yet achieved that.  Staffing levels, of course, are not the only issue at Cal/OSHA, but it is the one that underlines many others.  The people who pay the cost for failure to use available resources and the consequent missed benchmarks are California’s 19 million workers,

Hiring inspectors is not an easy task in California’s inflexible and cumbersome civil service system – but if there was sufficient political will on the part of the Brown Administration and its appointees, this problem could be greatly reduced.  With sufficient political will, the DLSE anti-relation unit would have the staffing it needs to do its job.  With sufficient political will, unions and workers would not be left in the dark during and after on-site Cal/OSHA inspections.  With sufficient political will, special efforts to recruit and hire field staff who speak languages other than English could be undertaken.

Why a labor-backed Democratic Party administration apparently does not have the political will to achieve these goals is an interesting question.  It is one that needs more time and space for a fuller examination.

Garrett Brown is a certified industrial hygienist who worked for Cal/OSHA for 20 years as a field Compliance officer and then served as Special Assistant to the Chief of the Division before retiring in 2014.  He has also been the volunteer Coordinator of the Maquiladora Health & Safety Support Network since 1993.

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Hawaii Hurricanes: Madeline and Lester? Or Neither? [Greg Laden's Blog]

Hawaii is tiny. And huge. Look:

Hawaii is larger in land area than Rhode Island, Delaware, or Connecticut, but smaller than all the other states. The big island is a bit larger in land area than all the other islands put together. Yes, the entirety of Hawaii covers a huge area of the Pacific. The longest linear dimension of the state of Hawaii is longer than the longest linear dimension of any US state, and of most countries. This is a property of many Pacific polities, including most Pacific island nations.

Yet, even though Hawaii, located in the Pacific tropics, should be a virtual catcher’s mitt for cyclones (hurricanes), the big island has hardly ever been hit directly by anything. Hawaii as a state is often affected by tropical storms, but usually in the form of surf (and Hawaii is where they invented surfing, so that is mostly a good thing). Is this simply because Hawaii is big (east-west wise) yet small (north-south wise) and thus is simply very lucky?

Or, is Hawaii located in an area that major tropical cyclones tend to go around, or at least, not through. Like this:

From Wikipedia:

Hawaii’s apparent immunity to most hurricanes

The islands of Hawaii, with Kauai as the notable exception, appear to be remarkably immune from direct hurricane hits. The USGS states that “more commonly, near-misses that generate large swell and moderately high winds causing varying degrees of damage are the hallmark of hurricanes passing close to the islands.”[31] This has also drawn media attention.[32][33] One notion is that Hawaii’s volcanic peaks slow down or divert storms.[34] A partial source of this idea may be the long list of hurricanes … that dissipated into tropical storms or depressions upon approaching the islands. Satellite images of Hurricane Flossie’s breakup when approaching Hawaii Island fueled this idea.[35] Another example may be Hurricane Felicia which dropped from Category 4 down to a tropical depression with residual winds predicted at only 35 miles per hour (56 km/h).[36]

Tropical Storm Flossie (not to be confused with Hurricane Flossie in 2007) provides still another example. On July 28, 2013, the storm appeared headed for a direct hit to the Big Island, home to Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. Both mountains rise to elevations in excess of 13,000 feet above sea level, and as Flossie approached the island, its track shifted abruptly overnight and assumed a more northerly alignment, heading instead to the island of Maui on July 29.[37]

Wind data in particular supports the USGS assertion that hurricane damage has been low on all islands except for Kauai. Data collected by the Western Regional Climate Center show no hurricane-strength winds on any Hawaii Islands with the exception of Kauai.[38] Despite this data, FEMA classified all of Hawaii as being in a “Wind-Borne Debris Region”.[39][40][41]

Before Hurricane Iniki in 1992, a standard homeowner’s insurance policy with extended coverage provided hurricane coverage. Since Iniki, many insurance policies exclude hurricane and a separate hurricane policy is required to obtain hurricane coverage.

At present, Hawaii, in particular the big island, is threatened with a tropical cyclone, likely to be a full on hurricane. Will it hit? Will it magically turn away from the island state?

Hurricane Madeline is weakening but at the same time heading for the big island, and should start affecting the island over the next day or two. This chart from Weather Underground lays out the expected timing:

But wait, there’s more. Hurricane Lester is also in the area and is heading for Hawaii as well. This would happen some time over the labor day weekend. Lester has less of a chance of being a full blown Hurricane when hitting Hawaii than Madeline, but it is way to early to be certain of much.

If two hurricanes hit Hawaii over the next several days, that would be rather amazing. If one hits Hawaii over the next several days that would notable. If both Hurricanes magically turn their course or dissipate before hitting Hawaii during the next several days, that will be data. Very interesting data!

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2bC53Ul

Hawaii is tiny. And huge. Look:

Hawaii is larger in land area than Rhode Island, Delaware, or Connecticut, but smaller than all the other states. The big island is a bit larger in land area than all the other islands put together. Yes, the entirety of Hawaii covers a huge area of the Pacific. The longest linear dimension of the state of Hawaii is longer than the longest linear dimension of any US state, and of most countries. This is a property of many Pacific polities, including most Pacific island nations.

Yet, even though Hawaii, located in the Pacific tropics, should be a virtual catcher’s mitt for cyclones (hurricanes), the big island has hardly ever been hit directly by anything. Hawaii as a state is often affected by tropical storms, but usually in the form of surf (and Hawaii is where they invented surfing, so that is mostly a good thing). Is this simply because Hawaii is big (east-west wise) yet small (north-south wise) and thus is simply very lucky?

Or, is Hawaii located in an area that major tropical cyclones tend to go around, or at least, not through. Like this:

From Wikipedia:

Hawaii’s apparent immunity to most hurricanes

The islands of Hawaii, with Kauai as the notable exception, appear to be remarkably immune from direct hurricane hits. The USGS states that “more commonly, near-misses that generate large swell and moderately high winds causing varying degrees of damage are the hallmark of hurricanes passing close to the islands.”[31] This has also drawn media attention.[32][33] One notion is that Hawaii’s volcanic peaks slow down or divert storms.[34] A partial source of this idea may be the long list of hurricanes … that dissipated into tropical storms or depressions upon approaching the islands. Satellite images of Hurricane Flossie’s breakup when approaching Hawaii Island fueled this idea.[35] Another example may be Hurricane Felicia which dropped from Category 4 down to a tropical depression with residual winds predicted at only 35 miles per hour (56 km/h).[36]

Tropical Storm Flossie (not to be confused with Hurricane Flossie in 2007) provides still another example. On July 28, 2013, the storm appeared headed for a direct hit to the Big Island, home to Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. Both mountains rise to elevations in excess of 13,000 feet above sea level, and as Flossie approached the island, its track shifted abruptly overnight and assumed a more northerly alignment, heading instead to the island of Maui on July 29.[37]

Wind data in particular supports the USGS assertion that hurricane damage has been low on all islands except for Kauai. Data collected by the Western Regional Climate Center show no hurricane-strength winds on any Hawaii Islands with the exception of Kauai.[38] Despite this data, FEMA classified all of Hawaii as being in a “Wind-Borne Debris Region”.[39][40][41]

Before Hurricane Iniki in 1992, a standard homeowner’s insurance policy with extended coverage provided hurricane coverage. Since Iniki, many insurance policies exclude hurricane and a separate hurricane policy is required to obtain hurricane coverage.

At present, Hawaii, in particular the big island, is threatened with a tropical cyclone, likely to be a full on hurricane. Will it hit? Will it magically turn away from the island state?

Hurricane Madeline is weakening but at the same time heading for the big island, and should start affecting the island over the next day or two. This chart from Weather Underground lays out the expected timing:

But wait, there’s more. Hurricane Lester is also in the area and is heading for Hawaii as well. This would happen some time over the labor day weekend. Lester has less of a chance of being a full blown Hurricane when hitting Hawaii than Madeline, but it is way to early to be certain of much.

If two hurricanes hit Hawaii over the next several days, that would be rather amazing. If one hits Hawaii over the next several days that would notable. If both Hurricanes magically turn their course or dissipate before hitting Hawaii during the next several days, that will be data. Very interesting data!

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2bC53Ul

August Pieces Of My Mind #3 [Aardvarchaeology]

• Today is the big book-selling festival on Drottninggatan in Stockholm, “the world’s longest book table”, which is probably true since the term “book table” is almost unknown outside Sweden. I’m bringing a backpack and the names Bengtsson, Bujold, LeGuin, Maugham, Paasilinna and Piraten.
• Several book sellers at the festival have told me “He’s great but nobody reads him any more” or “She’s great so I’m certainly not selling those” when I’ve asked about my favourites.
• I’m really interested in new ideas and methods in my discipline. But it annoys the hell out of me that what we mainly get is new buzzwords. And people pick them up in the most inane and transparent way.
• Lyric themes that put me off a song #1: whatever goes on on the dance floor.
• This piece of abyssal plain really isn’t very good. In fact, it’s quite abysmal.
• I thought Edward Sharpe was singing the words “undead audio” on his song “Brother”, so I checked the lyrics. And it turns out that he actually does.
• So funny with group pictures where people are leaning into image centre and the photographer leaves this huge empty space around them.
• Cousin E reports that his Chinese middle school English vocabulary does not include the word “pear”, but it does include “cannibal”.
• I just realised that I logged my 900th geocache during that rock festival in Dalecarlia, on the 11th! Took me over 11 years to get there.
• I’ve taught Cousin E seven boardgames since he arrived. Not only were they new games to him: several represented completely unfamiliar game mechanics. With four of these games, Cousin E won on his first try against seasoned grownups, some of whom really know these games.
• Apparently there’s a fad among Western geek kids to learn Japanese. The Stockholm Scifi Book Store has study materials dead centre in its display window, between Erik Granstrom’s new fantasy novel and Tintin’s rocket.
• Dreamed that my wife had vandalised all our brass candlesticks, hidden some of them and thrown the rest openly in the trash. Recalls the broken-off handles for candlesticks that I’ve seen in Fb’s metal detectorist groups lately.
• Eng. howitzer and Sw. haubits both go back to 15th century Czech houfnice, “crowd cannon”, “formation breaker”.
• A strange recurring trait of the Japanese short stories I’ve been reading lately in English translations is this childish guilelessness: an absence of irony, an apparent ignorance of Western literary clichés. “That Ainella is one tough customer, Yutaka thought.”
• Haven’t played Vector Race in over a quarter century. We all drove straight off the track in the first curve.
• If you find a dock when excavating in the Old Town of Stockholm, then it’s really hard to relate it to shoreline displacement. Because many docks were built on high-organic landfill that has been dramatically deflated by dehydration and microbial activity over the centuries. This means that your dock is currently at an unspecified much lower level than when it was built.
• That night the Baron dreamt of nary a woe / And none of his warrior-guests were at all be-nightmared
• Hunting laws regarding wolverines mean that they run a much greater risk of getting shot in Norway than in Sweden. They are however not smart enough to avoid Norway. On the contrary, they see Norway as a nicely empty area where it’s easy to find territory. So the net migration goes west.
• I like to refer to my inner Celt as “latent La Tène”.
• Two ticks bit my bottom when I went geocaching last Saturday. Bastards.
• Leftovers lunch: * A soggy vegetarian Vietnamese spring roll. * Rice with curry sauce that once contained chicken. * 1/3 kipper including roe.
• King Valdemar IV of Denmark in 1360: “Spy, bring me clandestine drawings of Visby’s defences! I will have that town!” Spy accidentally falls through a time warp and returns to the King with a copy of Emil Ekhoff’s 1922 volume documenting in detail the state of Visby’s ruinous town wall.
• “Manic Depression” would have been so much better if Hendrix had sung “your can of beans” instead of “your kind of scene”.
• I enjoy cleaning the sieve at the bottom of the dishwasher. I do it pretty much after every time the machine’s been run.

Vector Race

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2c03lgF

• Today is the big book-selling festival on Drottninggatan in Stockholm, “the world’s longest book table”, which is probably true since the term “book table” is almost unknown outside Sweden. I’m bringing a backpack and the names Bengtsson, Bujold, LeGuin, Maugham, Paasilinna and Piraten.
• Several book sellers at the festival have told me “He’s great but nobody reads him any more” or “She’s great so I’m certainly not selling those” when I’ve asked about my favourites.
• I’m really interested in new ideas and methods in my discipline. But it annoys the hell out of me that what we mainly get is new buzzwords. And people pick them up in the most inane and transparent way.
• Lyric themes that put me off a song #1: whatever goes on on the dance floor.
• This piece of abyssal plain really isn’t very good. In fact, it’s quite abysmal.
• I thought Edward Sharpe was singing the words “undead audio” on his song “Brother”, so I checked the lyrics. And it turns out that he actually does.
• So funny with group pictures where people are leaning into image centre and the photographer leaves this huge empty space around them.
• Cousin E reports that his Chinese middle school English vocabulary does not include the word “pear”, but it does include “cannibal”.
• I just realised that I logged my 900th geocache during that rock festival in Dalecarlia, on the 11th! Took me over 11 years to get there.
• I’ve taught Cousin E seven boardgames since he arrived. Not only were they new games to him: several represented completely unfamiliar game mechanics. With four of these games, Cousin E won on his first try against seasoned grownups, some of whom really know these games.
• Apparently there’s a fad among Western geek kids to learn Japanese. The Stockholm Scifi Book Store has study materials dead centre in its display window, between Erik Granstrom’s new fantasy novel and Tintin’s rocket.
• Dreamed that my wife had vandalised all our brass candlesticks, hidden some of them and thrown the rest openly in the trash. Recalls the broken-off handles for candlesticks that I’ve seen in Fb’s metal detectorist groups lately.
• Eng. howitzer and Sw. haubits both go back to 15th century Czech houfnice, “crowd cannon”, “formation breaker”.
• A strange recurring trait of the Japanese short stories I’ve been reading lately in English translations is this childish guilelessness: an absence of irony, an apparent ignorance of Western literary clichés. “That Ainella is one tough customer, Yutaka thought.”
• Haven’t played Vector Race in over a quarter century. We all drove straight off the track in the first curve.
• If you find a dock when excavating in the Old Town of Stockholm, then it’s really hard to relate it to shoreline displacement. Because many docks were built on high-organic landfill that has been dramatically deflated by dehydration and microbial activity over the centuries. This means that your dock is currently at an unspecified much lower level than when it was built.
• That night the Baron dreamt of nary a woe / And none of his warrior-guests were at all be-nightmared
• Hunting laws regarding wolverines mean that they run a much greater risk of getting shot in Norway than in Sweden. They are however not smart enough to avoid Norway. On the contrary, they see Norway as a nicely empty area where it’s easy to find territory. So the net migration goes west.
• I like to refer to my inner Celt as “latent La Tène”.
• Two ticks bit my bottom when I went geocaching last Saturday. Bastards.
• Leftovers lunch: * A soggy vegetarian Vietnamese spring roll. * Rice with curry sauce that once contained chicken. * 1/3 kipper including roe.
• King Valdemar IV of Denmark in 1360: “Spy, bring me clandestine drawings of Visby’s defences! I will have that town!” Spy accidentally falls through a time warp and returns to the King with a copy of Emil Ekhoff’s 1922 volume documenting in detail the state of Visby’s ruinous town wall.
• “Manic Depression” would have been so much better if Hendrix had sung “your can of beans” instead of “your kind of scene”.
• I enjoy cleaning the sieve at the bottom of the dishwasher. I do it pretty much after every time the machine’s been run.

Vector Race

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/2c03lgF

Experts declare Anthropocene has begun

Nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, 1946. Image via U.S. Dept. of Energy.

Has humanity become so prevalent and powerful on Earth that we’re now globally affecting the geologic record, the actual rock record used by geologists to divide the past into named blocks? If the answer is yes, should scientists declare we’ve entered a new geologic epoch? This week, a group of 35 scientists said, yes, we are globally affecting the rock record and, yes, we should officially consider a new epoch. They would name it the Anthropocene, meaning Age of Humans, a word first introduced by two scientists in the year 2000 that’s now gaining wider scientific acceptance. The Anthropocene Work Group reported this conclusion on Monday (August 29, 2016) to the 35th International Geological Congress going on this week in Cape Town, South Africa.

If scientists decide to accept the Anthropocene into the Geologic Time Scale, they’ll have to decide when it began. Scientists speak of golden spikes in Earth’s sediment layers, events laid down in the rocks that clearly demarcate one geologic epoch from another.

A widely known example of a golden spike occurred with the demise of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. Most scientists believe an asteroid strike ended their dominance, due to the discovery in the late 1970s of iridium in the rock record on all parts of Earth. Iridium is rare on Earth (found mostly in Earth’s core), but common in the rest of the solar system. This layer of iridium in the rock record is said to mark the time of the asteroid impact; it’s the golden spike that marks the end of the Cretaceous epoch.

What would be the golden spike separating the Anthropocene – the Age of Humans – from the rest of history? The answer is arbitrary, and members of the Anthropocene Work Group do not entirely agree.

But 28 of the 35 scientists do agree that the golden spike for the Anthropocene comes around the 1950s. That’s when the great acceleration began on Earth, when our human impacts intensified and began to happen globally, not just locally, scientists say.

About 10 members of the Anthropocene Work Group said they felt the start of the Anthropocene would coincide with the beginning of nuclear bomb testing. It started in the late 1940s and caused radioactive elements to be dispersed across Earth and thus laid down in the rock record.

Other group members pointed to other ongoing signs of the Age of Humans, however, which will ultimately find their way into the rock record, including plastic pollution, soot from power stations, aluminium and concrete particles and high levels of nitrogen and phosphate in soils, derived from artificial fertilizers.

And so defining when and how the Anthropocene began – assuming scientists do accept it and include it in the Geologic Time Scale – is a task that lies ahead.

Plastics aren’t permanent. They’ll eventually break down into fragments that’ll become buried in Earth’s sediments. When future geologists uncover these fragments, they might point to the start of the Anthropocene. Image via Plastic Ocean Gyre blog.

Colin Waters from the British Geological Survey is secretary to the Anthropocene Work Group. He told the BBC:

This is an update on where we are in our discussions.

We’ve got to a point where we’ve listed what we think the Anthropocene means to us as a working group.

The majority of us think it is real; that there is clearly something happening; that there are clearly signals in the environment that are recognizable and make the Anthropocene a distinct unit; and the majority of us think it would be justified to formally recognise it.

That doesn’t mean it will be formalized, but we’re going to go through the procedure of putting in a submission.

If the Anthropocene were formally defined as a geological epoch beginning in 1945, then newer structures – such as the Grant Marsh Interstate 94 bridge over the Missouri River in Bismarck, N.D. (foreground) – would be classified as Anthropocene. Older structures with or without recent updates, such as the Bismarck railroad bridge (center) would be classified as Holocene and Anthropocene. Photo via Joel M. Galloway, USGS.

So the word Anthropocene, though not a part of the official scientific lexicon yet, is gaining acceptance among scientists. You can read more about the history of the word, which was coined in the year 2000 by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and ecologist Eugene Stoermer in this article: What is the Anthropocene?

By the way, scientists now speak of our geologic age – basically everything since the end of the last major Ice Age, corresponding to the rise of complex human civilizations – as the Holocene. Holo is from a Greek root meaning whole or entire. You sometimes hear the Holocene called the Recent age.

Some have argued that the word Holocene is good enough to describe our human impact and that we don’t need the new term Anthropocene. There are arguments for and against including the Anthropocene in the Geologic Time Scale under the subheads multiple meanings and contrasting philosophies – and also hierarchy – in this article.

In the meantime, just remember the word Anthropocene.

You’ll be hearing more about it in the years ahead.

The Geologic Time Spiral from the U.S. Geologic Survey.

Bottom line: The Anthropocene Work Group reported their conclusions on August 29, 2016 to the 35th International Geological Congress in Cape Town, South Africa. The group said that the new epoch Anthropocene should be considered for official inclusion in the Geological Time Scale.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2bZQPgY

Nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, 1946. Image via U.S. Dept. of Energy.

Has humanity become so prevalent and powerful on Earth that we’re now globally affecting the geologic record, the actual rock record used by geologists to divide the past into named blocks? If the answer is yes, should scientists declare we’ve entered a new geologic epoch? This week, a group of 35 scientists said, yes, we are globally affecting the rock record and, yes, we should officially consider a new epoch. They would name it the Anthropocene, meaning Age of Humans, a word first introduced by two scientists in the year 2000 that’s now gaining wider scientific acceptance. The Anthropocene Work Group reported this conclusion on Monday (August 29, 2016) to the 35th International Geological Congress going on this week in Cape Town, South Africa.

If scientists decide to accept the Anthropocene into the Geologic Time Scale, they’ll have to decide when it began. Scientists speak of golden spikes in Earth’s sediment layers, events laid down in the rocks that clearly demarcate one geologic epoch from another.

A widely known example of a golden spike occurred with the demise of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. Most scientists believe an asteroid strike ended their dominance, due to the discovery in the late 1970s of iridium in the rock record on all parts of Earth. Iridium is rare on Earth (found mostly in Earth’s core), but common in the rest of the solar system. This layer of iridium in the rock record is said to mark the time of the asteroid impact; it’s the golden spike that marks the end of the Cretaceous epoch.

What would be the golden spike separating the Anthropocene – the Age of Humans – from the rest of history? The answer is arbitrary, and members of the Anthropocene Work Group do not entirely agree.

But 28 of the 35 scientists do agree that the golden spike for the Anthropocene comes around the 1950s. That’s when the great acceleration began on Earth, when our human impacts intensified and began to happen globally, not just locally, scientists say.

About 10 members of the Anthropocene Work Group said they felt the start of the Anthropocene would coincide with the beginning of nuclear bomb testing. It started in the late 1940s and caused radioactive elements to be dispersed across Earth and thus laid down in the rock record.

Other group members pointed to other ongoing signs of the Age of Humans, however, which will ultimately find their way into the rock record, including plastic pollution, soot from power stations, aluminium and concrete particles and high levels of nitrogen and phosphate in soils, derived from artificial fertilizers.

And so defining when and how the Anthropocene began – assuming scientists do accept it and include it in the Geologic Time Scale – is a task that lies ahead.

Plastics aren’t permanent. They’ll eventually break down into fragments that’ll become buried in Earth’s sediments. When future geologists uncover these fragments, they might point to the start of the Anthropocene. Image via Plastic Ocean Gyre blog.

Colin Waters from the British Geological Survey is secretary to the Anthropocene Work Group. He told the BBC:

This is an update on where we are in our discussions.

We’ve got to a point where we’ve listed what we think the Anthropocene means to us as a working group.

The majority of us think it is real; that there is clearly something happening; that there are clearly signals in the environment that are recognizable and make the Anthropocene a distinct unit; and the majority of us think it would be justified to formally recognise it.

That doesn’t mean it will be formalized, but we’re going to go through the procedure of putting in a submission.

If the Anthropocene were formally defined as a geological epoch beginning in 1945, then newer structures – such as the Grant Marsh Interstate 94 bridge over the Missouri River in Bismarck, N.D. (foreground) – would be classified as Anthropocene. Older structures with or without recent updates, such as the Bismarck railroad bridge (center) would be classified as Holocene and Anthropocene. Photo via Joel M. Galloway, USGS.

So the word Anthropocene, though not a part of the official scientific lexicon yet, is gaining acceptance among scientists. You can read more about the history of the word, which was coined in the year 2000 by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and ecologist Eugene Stoermer in this article: What is the Anthropocene?

By the way, scientists now speak of our geologic age – basically everything since the end of the last major Ice Age, corresponding to the rise of complex human civilizations – as the Holocene. Holo is from a Greek root meaning whole or entire. You sometimes hear the Holocene called the Recent age.

Some have argued that the word Holocene is good enough to describe our human impact and that we don’t need the new term Anthropocene. There are arguments for and against including the Anthropocene in the Geologic Time Scale under the subheads multiple meanings and contrasting philosophies – and also hierarchy – in this article.

In the meantime, just remember the word Anthropocene.

You’ll be hearing more about it in the years ahead.

The Geologic Time Spiral from the U.S. Geologic Survey.

Bottom line: The Anthropocene Work Group reported their conclusions on August 29, 2016 to the 35th International Geological Congress in Cape Town, South Africa. The group said that the new epoch Anthropocene should be considered for official inclusion in the Geological Time Scale.

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2bZQPgY

Star trails at Lake Tekapo

Image via Paul Wilson Images NZ

Paul Wilson took this shot near Lake Tekapo on the South Island of New Zealand. Paul wrote:

It’s easy to forget the Earth is rotating and not the stars. Star trails are a good reminder.

Paul told us that this image is 15 long exposure shots stacked on top of each other. Thanks Paul!

Enjoying EarthSky? Sign up for our free daily newsletter today!

Bottom line: Photo of star trails near Lake Tekapo, New Zealand

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2bIJIau

Image via Paul Wilson Images NZ

Paul Wilson took this shot near Lake Tekapo on the South Island of New Zealand. Paul wrote:

It’s easy to forget the Earth is rotating and not the stars. Star trails are a good reminder.

Paul told us that this image is 15 long exposure shots stacked on top of each other. Thanks Paul!

Enjoying EarthSky? Sign up for our free daily newsletter today!

Bottom line: Photo of star trails near Lake Tekapo, New Zealand

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2bIJIau

New data on cancer treatment to help improve care

New data out today offers a first glimpse at one aspect of the effects of cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy, across the whole NHS in England. Here, our chief clinician, Professor Peter Johnson, outlines the role these data will play in improving care for cancer patients in the future.

Professor Peter Johnson, chief clinician at Cancer Research UK

It’s always an uncertain time for cancer patients and their families when treatment is about to start.

But it can also be true for doctors like me.

We want to be sure that the treatments we prescribe have the best chance of helping each individual patient. And this is particularly true when considering treatments that can affect the entire body – including chemotherapy, targeted drugs and the latest immunotherapies.

It’s vital that we know as much as possible about how these systemic anti-cancer therapies (SACT) affect the different patients who arrive in our clinics with different needs.

We also need to know whether our patients are getting the best possible care, so that we can find ways to improve.

We know that UK cancer survival has doubled in the last 40 years but, frustratingly, we’ve not been able to measure all the finer details that we need. In fact, there has been very limited data on what happens to patients receiving these treatments in the NHS, despite most of them being prescribed on computers.

Today, that is starting to change.

We’ve been given a first look at new data, held by Public Health England, which allows us to examine these issues for all patients receiving these treatments in the English NHS.

In the first study of its kind in the world – published in The Lancet Oncology – we’ve worked with Public Health England to examine one aspect of how we deliver these treatments. We’ve measured the proportion of lung and breast cancer patients throughout England who die within 30 days of being given a dose of SACT treatment.

All types of treatment come with risks as well as benefits. It’s only by understanding the risks that we can manage them effectively, and ensure that our patients have the information to balance them against the potential gains.

We can’t say from this data whether specific patients should or shouldn’t have had different treatments. But it’s obvious that dying so soon after treatment makes it very unlikely someone has had the benefits that might be expected for other patients.

Crucially, what this data does is put our treatments in context. It starts to help doctors like me understand why these deaths occur and helps us minimise the risks and improve care for patients.

A rare event

Reassuringly, the report shows that these short-term deaths are relatively rare – similar to the findings from smaller studies.

In total we examined data from 28,364 women with breast cancer and 15,045 men and women with lung cancer who had received these treatments in England in 2014.

We found that for patients given SACT treatments with the intent of curing their disease fewer than 1 in every 100 breast cancer patients and 3 in every 100 lung cancer patients died within 30 days of having treatment in England.

The data also showed that the risk of these deaths depended on the age of the patient, their general wellbeing, gender (for lung cancer patients), and whether the treatment was given for curative or palliative reasons.

There were more deaths within 30 days for patients receiving palliative treatments, but they were still relatively rare – 7 in every 100 breast cancer patients and 10 in every 100 lung cancer patients. These patients had advanced, incurable cancers and the aim of treatment was to improve their quality of life for as long as possible by controlling cancer growth and providing relief from their symptoms.

For these patients, who are often very unwell, the risks are unavoidably higher. It’s essential that doctors like me have frank discussions with patients in these situations so we can agree on a treatment that will give them the results they want.

These findings help us to do that, so we can decide together whether these more intense treatments are the best way to achieve those results.

Knowing the details lets you know the risks

It’s a complex picture and we know there are gaps in the data, but now we have this information for the first time we can begin understanding it to improve the outlook for our patients.

One important result was that short-term death was more likely for older patients with breast and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who were given these treatments with the aim of curing their disease.

For the oldest group of breast cancer patients, the risk of short-term death was also higher than some estimates from clinical trials.

It’s likely that this is because older patients tend to be frailer, with other health problems and less able to tolerate side-effects than their younger counterparts.

A new benchmark

Previously, the only estimates of these deaths have come from clinical trials, which tend to involve patients who are younger and with few other medical problems.

In the real-world environment of the NHS, the situation is far more complex.

That’s why these new data, which includes patients from across the nation, are so vital for understanding how the risk differs among patients who fall outside the carefully defined rules of a clinical trial.

The report also shows that the risk of short-term death varies between NHS hospital trusts. At the moment there are still important gaps in the data, which make it hard to say whether the variation reflects real differences in quality of care or simply how a trust manages its data.

For example some trusts have not yet been able to accurately record whether the SACT treatment was given with curative or palliative intent.

That’s why it’s vital that these data continue to be collected in full, and trusts continue to review and improve the quality of the data they are providing.

But of course, early death is only one measure of the care a patient receives; the only way to avoid all deaths after treatment is not to give any treatment, which is not a solution. If more patients at high risk of early death receive SACT treatments, it might actually lead to better survival overall, if more patients benefit from it.

It’s important to help trusts and doctors review how we can balance these risks and benefits, with reducing the number of short-term deaths just one aspect of the journey towards better outcomes from cancer treatment.

How can this data improve cancer care?

This is the first time this type of data has been collected and analysed so extensively for a whole country. The process was a huge undertaking, but it now means we have a way to measure whether the health service is getting better at giving the right drugs to the right patients. It’s vital that these data continue to be collected and analysed to ensure there’s an improvement year on year.

Huge improvements in the data being provided to Public Health England by the NHS trusts has made this work possible. But it’s disappointing that the NHS still struggles with quality and completeness of data; these things are still holding us back.

I would like to see all trusts adopting electronic prescribing systems that allow much better data collection, and doing all they can to fix the information gaps that might stop us from using the data to its full potential.

Those trusts that aren’t doing so well also need to urgently review their data management and patient care to ensure that any issues are rapidly addressed.

This has already begun, and I hope to see improvements very soon.

The next step will be to start including more types of cancer in these reports, and other factors affecting patient care. And I want to see major improvements in the data available on other cancer treatments, such as surgery and radiotherapy, for which similar issues exist.

With that in hand, I’m confident that I, my colleagues, and NHS hospital trusts – not just in England but across the UK – will be better placed to keep raising the bar for our patients.

Professor Peter Johnson, chief clinician at Cancer Research UK

Reference

Wallington, M., et al. (2016). 30-day mortality after systemic anticancer treatment for breast and lung cancer in England: a population-based, observational study. The Lancet Oncology. DOI: 10.1016/S1470-2045(16)30383-7

from Cancer Research UK – Science blog http://ift.tt/2cb3V8R

New data out today offers a first glimpse at one aspect of the effects of cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy, across the whole NHS in England. Here, our chief clinician, Professor Peter Johnson, outlines the role these data will play in improving care for cancer patients in the future.

Professor Peter Johnson, chief clinician at Cancer Research UK

It’s always an uncertain time for cancer patients and their families when treatment is about to start.

But it can also be true for doctors like me.

We want to be sure that the treatments we prescribe have the best chance of helping each individual patient. And this is particularly true when considering treatments that can affect the entire body – including chemotherapy, targeted drugs and the latest immunotherapies.

It’s vital that we know as much as possible about how these systemic anti-cancer therapies (SACT) affect the different patients who arrive in our clinics with different needs.

We also need to know whether our patients are getting the best possible care, so that we can find ways to improve.

We know that UK cancer survival has doubled in the last 40 years but, frustratingly, we’ve not been able to measure all the finer details that we need. In fact, there has been very limited data on what happens to patients receiving these treatments in the NHS, despite most of them being prescribed on computers.

Today, that is starting to change.

We’ve been given a first look at new data, held by Public Health England, which allows us to examine these issues for all patients receiving these treatments in the English NHS.

In the first study of its kind in the world – published in The Lancet Oncology – we’ve worked with Public Health England to examine one aspect of how we deliver these treatments. We’ve measured the proportion of lung and breast cancer patients throughout England who die within 30 days of being given a dose of SACT treatment.

All types of treatment come with risks as well as benefits. It’s only by understanding the risks that we can manage them effectively, and ensure that our patients have the information to balance them against the potential gains.

We can’t say from this data whether specific patients should or shouldn’t have had different treatments. But it’s obvious that dying so soon after treatment makes it very unlikely someone has had the benefits that might be expected for other patients.

Crucially, what this data does is put our treatments in context. It starts to help doctors like me understand why these deaths occur and helps us minimise the risks and improve care for patients.

A rare event

Reassuringly, the report shows that these short-term deaths are relatively rare – similar to the findings from smaller studies.

In total we examined data from 28,364 women with breast cancer and 15,045 men and women with lung cancer who had received these treatments in England in 2014.

We found that for patients given SACT treatments with the intent of curing their disease fewer than 1 in every 100 breast cancer patients and 3 in every 100 lung cancer patients died within 30 days of having treatment in England.

The data also showed that the risk of these deaths depended on the age of the patient, their general wellbeing, gender (for lung cancer patients), and whether the treatment was given for curative or palliative reasons.

There were more deaths within 30 days for patients receiving palliative treatments, but they were still relatively rare – 7 in every 100 breast cancer patients and 10 in every 100 lung cancer patients. These patients had advanced, incurable cancers and the aim of treatment was to improve their quality of life for as long as possible by controlling cancer growth and providing relief from their symptoms.

For these patients, who are often very unwell, the risks are unavoidably higher. It’s essential that doctors like me have frank discussions with patients in these situations so we can agree on a treatment that will give them the results they want.

These findings help us to do that, so we can decide together whether these more intense treatments are the best way to achieve those results.

Knowing the details lets you know the risks

It’s a complex picture and we know there are gaps in the data, but now we have this information for the first time we can begin understanding it to improve the outlook for our patients.

One important result was that short-term death was more likely for older patients with breast and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who were given these treatments with the aim of curing their disease.

For the oldest group of breast cancer patients, the risk of short-term death was also higher than some estimates from clinical trials.

It’s likely that this is because older patients tend to be frailer, with other health problems and less able to tolerate side-effects than their younger counterparts.

A new benchmark

Previously, the only estimates of these deaths have come from clinical trials, which tend to involve patients who are younger and with few other medical problems.

In the real-world environment of the NHS, the situation is far more complex.

That’s why these new data, which includes patients from across the nation, are so vital for understanding how the risk differs among patients who fall outside the carefully defined rules of a clinical trial.

The report also shows that the risk of short-term death varies between NHS hospital trusts. At the moment there are still important gaps in the data, which make it hard to say whether the variation reflects real differences in quality of care or simply how a trust manages its data.

For example some trusts have not yet been able to accurately record whether the SACT treatment was given with curative or palliative intent.

That’s why it’s vital that these data continue to be collected in full, and trusts continue to review and improve the quality of the data they are providing.

But of course, early death is only one measure of the care a patient receives; the only way to avoid all deaths after treatment is not to give any treatment, which is not a solution. If more patients at high risk of early death receive SACT treatments, it might actually lead to better survival overall, if more patients benefit from it.

It’s important to help trusts and doctors review how we can balance these risks and benefits, with reducing the number of short-term deaths just one aspect of the journey towards better outcomes from cancer treatment.

How can this data improve cancer care?

This is the first time this type of data has been collected and analysed so extensively for a whole country. The process was a huge undertaking, but it now means we have a way to measure whether the health service is getting better at giving the right drugs to the right patients. It’s vital that these data continue to be collected and analysed to ensure there’s an improvement year on year.

Huge improvements in the data being provided to Public Health England by the NHS trusts has made this work possible. But it’s disappointing that the NHS still struggles with quality and completeness of data; these things are still holding us back.

I would like to see all trusts adopting electronic prescribing systems that allow much better data collection, and doing all they can to fix the information gaps that might stop us from using the data to its full potential.

Those trusts that aren’t doing so well also need to urgently review their data management and patient care to ensure that any issues are rapidly addressed.

This has already begun, and I hope to see improvements very soon.

The next step will be to start including more types of cancer in these reports, and other factors affecting patient care. And I want to see major improvements in the data available on other cancer treatments, such as surgery and radiotherapy, for which similar issues exist.

With that in hand, I’m confident that I, my colleagues, and NHS hospital trusts – not just in England but across the UK – will be better placed to keep raising the bar for our patients.

Professor Peter Johnson, chief clinician at Cancer Research UK

Reference

Wallington, M., et al. (2016). 30-day mortality after systemic anticancer treatment for breast and lung cancer in England: a population-based, observational study. The Lancet Oncology. DOI: 10.1016/S1470-2045(16)30383-7

from Cancer Research UK – Science blog http://ift.tt/2cb3V8R