news sciences

1st quarter moon with Jupiter June 30

Tonight – June 30, 2017 – be sure to watch the magnificent pairing of the moon and Jupiter as darkness falls. The moon and Jupiter rank as the brightest and third-brightest heavenly bodies of nighttime. What’s the second-brightest? It’s the blazing planet Venus, which resides exclusively in the morning sky for the rest of 2017.

Also, look for a bright star near Jupiter and the moon. This star is Spica – near Jupiter throughout 2017 – brightest light in the constellation Virgo.

The moon reaches its first quarter phase on July 1, 2017 at 0:51 UTC. Converting Universal Time to the clock time at North American time zones, the moon’s first quarter phase happens on June 30, at 9:51 p.m ADT, 8:51 p.m. EDT, 7:51 p.m. CDT, 6:51 p.m. MDT 5:51 p.m. PDT and 4:51 p.m. AKDT.

The Earth and moon are like mirrors to each other. If you were on the moon tonight, you’d see a last quarter Earth. Simulation of last quarter Earth as viewed from 1st quarter moon (2017 July 1 at 0:51 UTC). The terminator or shadow line represents Earth’s line of sunsets. Image via Fourmilab.

At quarter moon, the moon’s disk is half-illuminated by sunlight and half-immersed in the moon’s own shadow. The lunar terminator – the shadow line crossing between the moon’s day and night sides – shows you where it’s sunrise on the waxing first quarter moon. The moon is said to be at first quarter because, in its cycle of phases, the moon is one quarter the way from one new moon to the next.

Why you need to ‘opt in’ to keep hearing from Cancer Research UK

Tomorrow is an important day for us. We will become an ‘opt in’ charity, meaning we’ll only contact supporters who have given specific permission for us to do so.

We’re doing this because we believe it’s the right thing to do. We want to communicate with our supporters in the way they want, and believe giving people a positive experience will help bring us closer to our ambitions as a charity.

Our move to opt in could lead to a short term dip in fundraising, which might affect the work we do in the future. But over time we believe this will shift, and we’ll see increased fundraising because we’ll only contact people who really want to hear from us.

In April last year we were one of the first charities to start the process of moving to opt in, asking all our new supporters to choose whether or not to receive marketing communications from us.

Tomorrow, this same process will apply to all our supporters, existing and new.

What will this mean?

In the past 12 months alone, thanks to our supporters, Cancer Research UK-funded scientists involved in the TRACERx lung cancer study found that a blood test could help predict if a patient’s cancer will come back after treatment earlier than scans. And results from the Cancer Research UK-supported ESPAC-4 clinical trial showed that giving pancreatic cancer patients who’ve had surgery two chemotherapy drugs instead of one greatly improves their chances of surviving for at least five years.

We also announced a £10 million investment in PRECISION-Panc, a study aiming to get pancreatic cancer patients on to clinical trials faster. And through our Grand Challenge awards we gave four international teams over £70 million to answer some of the biggest questions in cancer research.

We were also delighted that after years of campaigning around radiotherapy, and raising awareness that patients are missing out on the treatment, NHS England announced a £130 million investment in new radiotherapy machines.

This progress has only been possible because of our supporters. And being able to contact them, especially by post or telephone, plays a big part in that.

Back in the 1970s, just 1 in 4 people with cancer survived for 10 years or more. Thanks to our supporters, and the brilliant scientists, doctors and nurses we fund across the UK, that figure has doubled so that 2 in 4 people now survive for at least 10 years.

The progress we’ve made is phenomenal, yet we still have a long way to go. With people living longer and increased awareness leading to more diagnoses, 1 in 2 people in the UK born after 1960 will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives. To keep making progress against cancer we need to be able to keep supporting the best research.

What happens now?

Inevitably, as of tomorrow, we will be reaching fewer people in our communications, which means we could take a financial hit. It costs money to make our vital work happen and to fund it we have to ask for support and donations.

That’s why we’re making a plea to those who might not know, may have forgotten that this is happening, or haven’t yet had a chance to tell us their preferences.

If you want to continue to hear from Cancer Research UK about news of our research progress, appeals and ways you can support, let us know.

Right now, 30 seconds of your time and a quick box tick will help you keep up to date with our work in any way that you would like.

Visit our website for more information and to tell us how you want to hear about ways you can support us. If you change your mind about how you want to hear from us at any time just go to our online form at cruk.org/tellus and update your preferences.

Ed Aspel, executive director of fundraising & marketing at Cancer Research UK

from Cancer Research UK – Science blog http://ift.tt/2uq3lMx

Tomorrow is an important day for us. We will become an ‘opt in’ charity, meaning we’ll only contact supporters who have given specific permission for us to do so.

In April last year we were one of the first charities to start the process of moving to opt in, asking all our new supporters to choose whether or not to receive marketing communications from us.

Tomorrow, this same process will apply to all our supporters, existing and new.

What will this mean?

This progress has only been possible because of our supporters. And being able to contact them, especially by post or telephone, plays a big part in that.

What happens now?

That’s why we’re making a plea to those who might not know, may have forgotten that this is happening, or haven’t yet had a chance to tell us their preferences.

If you want to continue to hear from Cancer Research UK about news of our research progress, appeals and ways you can support, let us know.

Right now, 30 seconds of your time and a quick box tick will help you keep up to date with our work in any way that you would like.

Ed Aspel, executive director of fundraising & marketing at Cancer Research UK

from Cancer Research UK – Science blog http://ift.tt/2uq3lMx

Fourth of July Science for Family Fun

Take advantage of summer traditions to do hands-on with science with your kids!

from Science Buddies Blog http://ift.tt/2sWau9k

Climate scientists just debunked deniers' favorite argument

Whenever they hold one of their frequent hearings to reject and deny established climate science, congressional Republicans invariably trot out contrarian scientist John Christy, who disputes the accuracy of climate models. In doing so, Christy uses a cherry-picked, error riddled chart, but there’s a nugget of truth in his argument. Although the discrepancy isn’t nearly as large as Christy’s misleading chart suggests, atmospheric temperatures seem not to have warmed quite as fast since the turn of the century as climate model simulations anticipated they would.

Remote Sensing Systems estimate of the temperature of the middle troposphere compared to the CMIP5 multi-model average (top frame), and the difference between the two over time (bottom frame). Illustration: Santer et al. (2017), Nature Geoscience

How you react to this information is a good test of whether you’re a skeptic or a denier. A denier will declare “aha, the models are wrong, therefore we don’t need any climate policies!” A skeptic will ask what’s causing the difference between the observational estimates and model simulations.

There are many possible explanations. Maybe the tricky and often-adjusted estimates of the atmospheric temperature made by instruments on orbiting satellites are biased. Maybe there’s something wrong with the models, or our understanding of Earth’s atmosphere. Maybe the inputs used in the model simulations are flawed. The answer is likely a combination of these possibilities, but in congressional testimony earlier this year, Christy tried to place the blame entirely on the models, with a denier-style framing:

the average of the models is considered to be untruthful in representing the recent decades of climate variation and change, and thus would be inappropriate for use in predicting future changes in the climate or for related policy decisions.

And in testimony to Congress in December 2015, Christy offered his unsupported speculation that the discrepancy was a result of climate models being too sensitive to rising greenhouse gases:

Indeed, the theoretical (model) view as expressed in the IPCC AR5 in every case overestimated the bulk tropical atmospheric temperature response of extra greenhouse gases … indicating the theoretical understanding of the climate response is too sensitive to greenhouse gases.

New study tests and falsifies Christy’s assertions

The issue is that climate model simulations are run using specific scenarios. These scenarios assume specific changes in factors that influence global temperature and climate changes (known as “forcings”), like rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases and changes in solar and volcanic activity. Climate models don’t make “predictions;” rather, they make “projections” of how temperatures and other climatological factors will change in response to those forcing input scenarios. There’s also a random component known as “internal variability” due to factors like unpredictable ocean cycles.

An infamous example of deniers exploiting this wonky technical point to mislead policymaker happened in 1998. Congressional Republicans invited fossil fuel-funded Pat Michaels to testify ahead of the Kyoto international climate negotiations. In a shameless distortion of reality, Michaels evaluated a 1988 global temperature projection by James Hansen at NASA, but deleted all except the scenario that was the least like the actual forcing changes that had occurred over the prior decade. By only looking at Hansen’s model projection under a scenario where greenhouse gases rose much faster than they had in reality, Michaels deceptively made it appear as though Hansen’s climate model had vastly over-predicted global warming.

Santer’s team found a similar issue in comparing simulated and observed changes in atmospheric temperatures over the past few decades:

There are known systematic errors in these forcings in model simulations performed in support of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. These errors arise in part because the simulations were performed before more reliable estimates of early 21st century forcing became available. The net effect of the forcing errors is that the simulations underestimate some of the cooling influences contributing to the observed “slowdown”.

For example, were Christy right that models are too sensitive to rising greenhouse gases, they should be systematically wrong during the entire period for which we have observational data. On the contrary, aside from a small discrepancy in the late 20th century that can be explained by natural internal variability, Santer’s team showed that the difference between model simulations and observations only begins around 1998. A problem with model sensitivity would also show up in studies looking at global temperature changes in response to large volcanic eruptions, which create a big change in forcing and temperature. But those studies rule out the low climate sensitivities that Christy favors, and as Santer’s team notes:

there are no large systematic model errors in tropospheric cooling following the eruptions of El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991.

On the other hand, research has identified a number of real-world cooling influences in the early 21st century that weren’t accurately represented in the climate model simulation scenarios. The sun went into an unusually quiet cycle, there was a series of moderate volcanic eruptions, and the boom in Chinese coal power plants added sunlight-blocking pollution to the atmosphere. Using statistical tests, Santer’s team showed that those unexpected cooling effects combined with shifts in ocean cycles best explained the model-data discrepancy in atmospheric temperatures over the past 20 years.

Deniers respond by turning on the spin cycle

Unsurprisingly, in blogs and on Twitter, deniers tried to spin the results of this study in their favor. Some claimed that the paper admitted there was a “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming. In reality, the paper used neither term, but did use the phrase “slowdown” 15 times, including explicitly clarifying that it was a “temporary” slowdown. In other words, the study clearly rejected the myth that global warming “paused;” instead, the rise in atmospheric temperatures temporarily slowed due to the aforementioned decline in solar activity, increase in pollution from coal plants and volcanic eruptions, and shifts on ocean cycles.

Other contrarians have exhibited their confirmation bias by claiming the paper is an admission that climate models are wrong. As statistician George Box said, “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” Declaring that climate models are wrong and tossing them in the waste bin is a brain-dead denial move. What any skeptical scientific mind should want to know is why they’re imperfect – what’s causing the difference between simulations and reality, and what can we learn from that?

Click here to read the rest

from Skeptical Science http://ift.tt/2t4M2Rw

the average of the models is considered to be untruthful in representing the recent decades of climate variation and change, and thus would be inappropriate for use in predicting future changes in the climate or for related policy decisions.

And in testimony to Congress in December 2015, Christy offered his unsupported speculation that the discrepancy was a result of climate models being too sensitive to rising greenhouse gases:

Indeed, the theoretical (model) view as expressed in the IPCC AR5 in every case overestimated the bulk tropical atmospheric temperature response of extra greenhouse gases … indicating the theoretical understanding of the climate response is too sensitive to greenhouse gases.

New study tests and falsifies Christy’s assertions

Santer’s team found a similar issue in comparing simulated and observed changes in atmospheric temperatures over the past few decades:

There are known systematic errors in these forcings in model simulations performed in support of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. These errors arise in part because the simulations were performed before more reliable estimates of early 21st century forcing became available. The net effect of the forcing errors is that the simulations underestimate some of the cooling influences contributing to the observed “slowdown”.

there are no large systematic model errors in tropospheric cooling following the eruptions of El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991.

Deniers respond by turning on the spin cycle

Click here to read the rest

from Skeptical Science http://ift.tt/2t4M2Rw

SkS Analogy 9 - The greenhouse effect is a stack of blankets

Tag Line

The greenhouse effect is like a stack of blankets on a winter night.

Elevator Statements

More blankets = more warmth: The greenhouse effect is like blankets warming the Earth. If it is -18°C (0°F) in your bedroom, you need a few blankets to keep yourself warm. More blankets = more warming. Too many blankets and you sweat. So the point is that the greenhouse effect is a good thing, up to a point.
More blankets means warmer inside, cooler outside: With an increasing number of blankets, the temperature above the blankets gets cooler, because more energy is trapped below the blankets. With increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs) in Earth’s atmosphere, the upper atmosphere gets progressively cooler, because more energy is trapped in the lower layers of the atmosphere. This is one way that scientists know that the recent warming is due to greenhouse gases and not due to increasing solar output. In the sleeping analogy, if you turned up the temperature in the room, it would get warmer both above and below the blankets. If the recent warming was due to a hotter sun, then both the upper and lower atmosphere would warm. But the upper atmosphere is getting colder, just as the top of the outer blanket covering you gets colder when you add more blankets but leave the room temperature the same. See the SkS article "Is the CO₂ effect saturated?"
It is not the rate at which you put blankets on, but the total number of blankets that determines your final warmth. CO₂ emission rates don’t mean anything, except that if we slow the emission rates it buys us more time. It is the total CO₂ emitted that matters, just like it is only the total number of blankets over you that matters, and not the rate at which you put them on. Carbon budgets refer to the total amount of CO₂ we can emit before we exceed a dangerous level of warming, just as a blanket budget represents the total number of blankets we can tolerate before we start to sweat and overheat. Some skeptics refer to a time about 600 million years ago, during the late Ordovician when CO₂ levels were higher, but earth was the same temperature as now, or cooler. They point to this time to imply that CO₂ levels do not correlate to temperature. But 600 million years ago the sun was cooler (like a colder bedroom), so that the colder bedroom combined with more blankets = similar temperature as today. If you turn down the heat in your room, you need an extra blanket or two. Thus, with a colder room, your blanket budget is higher.

Climate Science

On the topic of the blanket budget, assuming that we warm 3°C for every doubling of CO₂ (this is the average climate sensitivity used by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]), this corresponds to the following temperature increase for given CO₂ atmospheric concentrations. Each of these atmospheric concentrations roughly corresponds to a particular CO₂ budget.
•   350 ppm CO₂ = 1°C warming
•   445 ppm CO₂ = 2°C warming (2°C is the target agreed to by the Paris Agreement)
•   560 ppm CO₂ = 3°C warming
•   700 ppm CO₂ = 4°C warming (considered by many Climate Scientists to be unbearable)
We are currently at about 406 ppm, increasing at about 2 ppm/year. This means that at the current emission rates we will have reached our budget for 2°C by the year 2035 and crossed into really dangerous territory. This is why Climate Scientists are saying that there is no time to waste for cutting our carbon emissions.

The budgets used by the IPCC are based on scenarios more complex than the simple math above, but IPCC budget estimates also often assume that we will be able to suck CO₂ out of the air and bury it in the ground … at some time in the future. My simple estimate uses a climate sensitivity of 3°C/doubling of CO₂, and assumes that we will not be successful at sucking CO₂ out of the atmosphere and storing it underground. After all, to bring CO₂ concentrations down means that we have to suck all of the CO₂ emitted in a given year + an extra amount. Is that feasible? Great if we succeed, but at current emission rates we will be at our budget limit by 2035, and the planet will be warming while we are trying to bring these massive negative emissions technologies online. A good read on the subject is Kevin Anderson, or if you can watch him as well.

from Skeptical Science http://ift.tt/2t4JzXd

Tag Line

The greenhouse effect is like a stack of blankets on a winter night.

Elevator Statements

More blankets = more warmth: The greenhouse effect is like blankets warming the Earth. If it is -18°C (0°F) in your bedroom, you need a few blankets to keep yourself warm. More blankets = more warming. Too many blankets and you sweat. So the point is that the greenhouse effect is a good thing, up to a point.
More blankets means warmer inside, cooler outside: With an increasing number of blankets, the temperature above the blankets gets cooler, because more energy is trapped below the blankets. With increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs) in Earth’s atmosphere, the upper atmosphere gets progressively cooler, because more energy is trapped in the lower layers of the atmosphere. This is one way that scientists know that the recent warming is due to greenhouse gases and not due to increasing solar output. In the sleeping analogy, if you turned up the temperature in the room, it would get warmer both above and below the blankets. If the recent warming was due to a hotter sun, then both the upper and lower atmosphere would warm. But the upper atmosphere is getting colder, just as the top of the outer blanket covering you gets colder when you add more blankets but leave the room temperature the same. See the SkS article "Is the CO₂ effect saturated?"
It is not the rate at which you put blankets on, but the total number of blankets that determines your final warmth. CO₂ emission rates don’t mean anything, except that if we slow the emission rates it buys us more time. It is the total CO₂ emitted that matters, just like it is only the total number of blankets over you that matters, and not the rate at which you put them on. Carbon budgets refer to the total amount of CO₂ we can emit before we exceed a dangerous level of warming, just as a blanket budget represents the total number of blankets we can tolerate before we start to sweat and overheat. Some skeptics refer to a time about 600 million years ago, during the late Ordovician when CO₂ levels were higher, but earth was the same temperature as now, or cooler. They point to this time to imply that CO₂ levels do not correlate to temperature. But 600 million years ago the sun was cooler (like a colder bedroom), so that the colder bedroom combined with more blankets = similar temperature as today. If you turn down the heat in your room, you need an extra blanket or two. Thus, with a colder room, your blanket budget is higher.

Climate Science

from Skeptical Science http://ift.tt/2t4JzXd

Why do quasars twinkle?

Globules of hydrogen gas in the Helix Nebula, imaged with the Hubble Space Telescope. Image via C. R. O’Dell/, K. Handron/ NASA/ Manly Astrophysics.

Australian astronomers said on June 27, 2016 that they might have solved the 30-year-old mystery of why quasars twinkle. You know how stars twinkle as seen from Earth’s surface, but not from space? The reason stars twinkle relates to their tiny size as seen from Earth; stars appear as pinpoints, even through earthly telescopes. Earth’s atmosphere is what causes these pinpoint stars to twinkle. Likewise, say these astronomers, the tiny sizes of quasars in space might be related to their twinkling as seen from Earth. But it’s not Earth’s atmosphere causing the twinkling. These astronomers think the cause is gas filaments surrounding stars:

…like the strands of a pompom.

Dr Mark Walker (Manly Astrophysics) and collaborators at Caltech, Manly Astrophysics and CSIRO (the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) published their conclusions about the twinkling of quasars on June 27 in the peer-reviewed Astrophysical Journal. Their evidence comes from research done with CSIRO’s Compact Array radio telescope in eastern Australia.

Walker’s team was studying quasars – powerful, distant galaxies – when they saw one called PKS 1322–110 start to dim and brighten wildly at radio wavelengths over just a few hours.

“This quasar was twinkling violently,” Walker said.

Quasar radio twinkling was recognized in the 1980s. Most often it is gentle – small, slow changes in radio brightness. Violent twinkling is rare and unpredictable.

Stars in the night sky twinkle when currents of air in our atmosphere focus and defocus their light. In the same way, quasars twinkle when streams of warm gas in interstellar space focus and defocus their radio signals.

But until now it was a mystery what those streams were and where they lay.

The first sign that stars are involved came when the team prepared to look at their twinkling quasar, PKS 1322–110, with one of the 10-m Keck optical telescopes in Hawai’i.

“At that point we realised this quasar is very close on the sky to the hot star Spica,” co-author Dr Vikram Ravi (Caltech) said.

Walker remembered that another violently twinkling quasar, J1819+3845, is close on the sky to the hot star Vega – something previously noted by other researchers. Two hot stars, two twinkling quasars: is this just a coincidence?

Further work suggested it’s not.

Schematic graphic of quasar twinkling. Image via M. Walker/ CSIRO/ Manly Astrophysics.

Walker’s team re-examined earlier data on J1819+3845 and another violent twinkler, PKS 1257–326. They found that this second quasar lies close on the sky to a hot star called Alhakim.

The chance of having both twinkling quasars near hot stars is one in ten million, the researchers calculated.

“We have very detailed observations of these two sources,” co-author Dr Hayley Bignall (CSIRO) said. “They show that the twinkling is caused by long, thin structures.”

The team suggests that every hot star is surrounded by a throng of warm gas filaments, all pointing towards it.

“We think these stars look like the Helix Nebula,” Walker said.

In the Helix a star sits in a swarm of cool globules of molecular hydrogen gas, each about as big as our solar system. Ultraviolet radiation from the star blasts the globules, giving each one a skin of warm gas and a long gas tail flowing outwards.

The star in the Helix is in its death throes, and astronomers usually assume that the globules arose late in the star’s life. But Walker thinks such globules might be present around younger, mainstream stars. “They might date from when the stars formed, or even earlier,” he said.

“Globules don’t emit much light, so they could be common yet have escaped notice so far,” he added.

“Now we’ll turn over every rock to find more signs of them.”

CSIRO’s Australia Telescope Compact Array. Image via D. Smyth/ Manly Astrophysics.

Bottom line:

Via Manly Astrophysics

from EarthSky http://ift.tt/2tnF2St