Chemical Traces Hint Sponges Predate Snowball Earth

Chemical traces left in 635 million-year-old rocks in Oman provide the earliest evidence so far of animal life, researchers said Wednesday.

[...]

"There is a great wealth of evidence these sponges were the first multi-cellular organisms to exist."

Using a chemical analysis of molecules in rocks dated to 635 million years ago, the researchers discovered a modified form of cholesterol only produced by the sponges.

This suggests the creatures existed before a monstrous ice age that occurred around 630 million years ago, an interesting finding because many scientists believe the frozen periods spurred the development of complex forms of life, Summons said.

These simple forms of animal life came about 200 million years before land plants appeared on Earth, Summons added. The first single cell bacteria and other similar forms of life appeared around two-and-a-half billion years ago.

The oldest visible fossils of animals found in rocks are 580 million years old but the findings from this paper published in the journal Nature show that looking at molecular evidence is also key to better understanding evolution, he said.

hmmm. This one needs to have the paper before I'll say more than hmm. (wish eureka alert ad had this one up first)

LLNL's Sequoia Planned as 20 PetaFlops

Roadrunner and Jaguar, the DOE supercomputers that launched the petaflop era last year, will soon be eclipsed by new machines more than ten times as powerful. IBM and the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced on Tuesday that in 2011 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will install a 20 petaflop system to provide computational support for the country's aging nuclear weapons.

Building on its Blue Gene heritage, IBM will deliver "Dawn," a 500 teraflop Blue Gene/P system in the first quarter of this year, followed by "Sequoia," a 20 petaflop next-generation Blue Gene/Q machine for 2011. Sequoia is expected to officially go online in 2012. The new machines will take over Lawrence Livermore's weapon simulation codes that are being maintained under the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program. Currently this work is being done with the existing capability supercomputers at the lab: the 100 teraflop ASC Purple and the 600 teraflop Blue Gene/L.

Dawn will act as an interim platform for porting and scaling the weapons codes. Once the Blue Gene/Q super comes online, those codes will be moved over to the bigger machine for production. The Dawn machine is in the process of being built right now, with about half of the machine already wired together at Lawrence Livermore. The lab is planning on getting the rest of the hardware over the next few months, with system acceptance scheduled for April.

[...]

Not only will Sequoia be more than ten times as powerful as the current crop of petaflop supercomputers, its energy efficiency will be much improved. According to IBM Deep Computing VP Dave Turek, Sequoia will consume around 6 megawatts, yielding an energy efficiency ratio of 3,000 FLOPS/watt. That represents a 7X improvement over the Blue Gene/P generation (440 FLOPS/watt), and is even better than the Cell-based Roadrunner system at Los Alamos (587 FLOPS/watt). For a starker comparison, the 1.6 petaflop Opteron-based Jaguar supercomputer installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory uses about 8.5 megawatts (188 FLOPS/watt).

[...]

IBM is not releasing low-level details of the Blue Gene/Q architecture. However, since Sequoia will be composed of 98,304 compute nodes and contain a total of 1.6 million cores, one can surmise that a Blue Gene/Q node will contain 16 cores. Whether this is implemented as one 16-core chip or two 8-core chips (or even four quad-core chips) remains to be seen. Since Sequoia will sport 1.6 petabytes of memory, each node stands to have 16 GB. The current Blue Gene/P technology offers 4 cores and 4 GB of main memory per node.

1.6 million cores. I don't want to sound like a poo-poo-er, but... 1.6 MILLION CORES. There are exceedingly few algorithms or problem sets that will scale to that level. Climate. Some explosions. There are great deal of users here that are on the verge of being shuffled off to non HPC assets. If Sequoia is the wave of the future, these guys are toast. There's no way to gang together their moderately parallel apps into ones that will work on something that scale.

Some scattered notes and thoughts: per core memory is 1 GB (note: if you have more than 2 you are idling your CPU big time, folks). 400k processors means there will be thousands of them failing at a time: with the so-called 5 9s of reliability (99.999%) there will be 4 CPUs down at any given time. More likely, with a 97%, then 20k CPUs will be down and out. Flops per core doesn't seem to have improved much (no surprise). Power per core is improved though.

In the era of Sequoia, assuming it works, even Franklin (our Cray) will no longer be an HPC asset really. Supercomputer status is a moving target. Keep up or end up someone's desktop.

NIF Complete, Ready to Begin Ramp Up

The US National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, California, is almost ready to fire up its 192 laser beams to recreate the Sun's fusion burn.

The last of the project's 6,206 optics units ? the mostly glass and crystal components that focus the lasers onto a tiny target ? was installed on 26 January. It marked the end of the US$3.5-billion facility's construction ahead of a federal deadline of 31 March.

After years of delay and hundreds of millions of dollars in overrun costs, "the project is, for all intents and purposes, completed", says NIF director Edward Moses. He will now focus on ramping up the 'shots' of laser light. On hitting the target, the shots create temperatures of more than 100 million degrees and pressures that are thousands of times greater than at Earth's core, which scientists hope will trigger nuclear fusion. Although smaller lasers have achieved petawatt (1015 W) powers in femtosecond (10?15 s) bursts, NIF's total energy will exceed that of any current facility. Its goal is to reach 1.8 million joules, far greater than the 40,000 joules generated by the current leader: OMEGA at the University of Rochester, New York. It is likely to remain at the top until a similar facility, the Laser Mégajoule near Bordeaux, France, is completed in 2010.

Note: this would be a great grand pappy of a fusion drive. ;)

The Counter Younger Dryas Impact Paper

Wildfire responses to abrupt climate change in North America

1. J. R. Marlona,1,
2. P. J. Bartleina,
3. M. K. Walsha,
4. S. P. Harrisonb,
5. K. J. Brownc,d,
6. M. E. Edwardse,f,
7. P. E. Higuerag,
8. M. J. Powerh,
9. R. S. Andersoni,
10. C. Brilesg,
11. A. Brunelleh,
12. C. Carcailletj,
13. M. Danielsk,
14. F. S. Hul,
15. M. Lavoiem,
16. C. Longn,
17. T. Minckleyo,
18. P. J. H. Richardp,
19. A. C. Scottq,
20. D. S. Shaferr,
21. W. Tinners,
22. C. E. Umbanhowar, Jr.t and
23. C. Whitlockg

Abstract

It is widely accepted, based on data from the last few decades and on model simulations, that anthropogenic climate change will cause increased fire activity. However, less attention has been paid to the relationship between abrupt climate changes and heightened fire activity in the paleorecord. We use 35 charcoal and pollen records to assess how fire regimes in North America changed during the last glacial–interglacial transition (15 to 10 ka), a time of large and rapid climate changes. We also test the hypothesis that a comet impact initiated continental-scale wildfires at 12.9 ka; the data do not support this idea, nor are continent-wide fires indicated at any time during deglaciation. There are, however, clear links between large climate changes and fire activity. Biomass burning gradually increased from the glacial period to the beginning of the Younger Dryas. Although there are changes in biomass burning during the Younger Dryas, there is no systematic trend. There is a further increase in biomass burning after the Younger Dryas. Intervals of rapid climate change at 13.9, 13.2, and 11.7 ka are marked by large increases in fire activity. The timing of changes in fire is not coincident with changes in human population density or the timing of the extinction of the megafauna. Although these factors could have contributed to fire-regime changes at individual sites or at specific times, the charcoal data indicate an important role for climate, and particularly rapid climate change, in determining broad-scale levels of fire activity.

Link above.

UC Berkeley Energy Symposium

Raytheon's Laser Centurion

50 kw, solid state, almost assuredly pulsed and its tied to the same radars and such that the Phalanx point defense system uses. This has a lot more short term promise than the Laser Avenger. The LA was only a one kilowatt laser (now 2): that makes burn through time on anything more than balsa wood or cheap plastic take far too long.

That pointer-tracker looks smaller than THEL's to me, but I could be sizing that up poorly.

I wonder if this is at HELSTF or not.

Oh, note, some of the countermeasures that are present on the THEL wikipedia page don't work: they have been testing some of them (such as reflective coatings AND rotating bodies) for over two decades. The HELs win every time. Huh, who'd over thunk it. Wikipedia has something wrong. Ah well.

Now THAT'S a SNAKE!

Excavations in Colombia co-organized by Carlos Jaramillo, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Florida's Florida Museum of Natural History, unearthed fossil remains of a new snake species named Titanoboa cerrejonensis.

Surrounded by huge trucks extracting coal from Cerrejon, one of the world's largest open-pit mines, researchers discovered fossilized bones of super-sized snakes and their prey, crocodiles and turtles, in the Cerrejon Formation, along with fossilized plant material from the oldest known rainforest in the Americas, which flourished at the site 58-60 million years ago.

Jason Head, the lead author of the new species description in the journal Nature, is a research associate at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Head, with David Polly, associate professor of geosciences at Indiana University, used the ratio between vertebral size and the length of existing snakes to estimate that this boa-like snake must have reached 13 meters (42 feet) in length and weighed more than a ton. Titanoboa, as it is now called, is the largest snake ever known, and was the largest non-marine vertebrate from the epoch immediately following the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

What in the world was a snake THAT large eating in the paleocene of SoAm?

A WAAAAY Better Choco Canyon

And the mascot is "cocoapelli".

I laughed so damned hard I was really glad I didn't have anything to drink when I read that.

microecos is the source of the above. I made the pun and Neil ran with it. REALLY ran with it. My readers HAD to see this.

Oh My Political Views!

This is absurd, but funny.

My Political Views
I am a centrist moderate social authoritarian
Right: 0.62, Authoritarian: 1.48

Political Spectrum Quiz

(side effect of being a parent now? lol)

My Foreign Policy Views
Score: 6.04

Political Spectrum Quiz

(pardon me while I wipe away the foam at the mouth)

My Culture War Stance
Score: -0.7

Political Spectrum Quiz

(I'm mildly lefty?! OH NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! (not serious for the humor impaired)

Anasazi Choco Canyon

Chemical residues found on pottery jar shards reveal that the practice of drinking chocolate had spread at least as far north as Chaco Canyon (map) in northern New Mexico by A.D. 1000 to 1125—400 years earlier than chocolate was thought to have reached what is now the United States.

The discovery suggests a vast trade network helped deliver chocolate from Central America, where the seeds of the cacao tree were first transformed into beverages some 3,000 years ago.

"That's a long way to go for something that you don't need for survival, [something] that's more of a delicacy," said Patricia Crown, an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico and co-author of the new study, which appears in tomorrow's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

Anyone writing alternate history along the lines of Doug's old Bronze Age New World TL really ought to take note. The trade was nontrivial: they also found parrots and metal bells previously. It's PDC too. ;)

(the title really is a pun, isn't it?)

Croatian Kurst Terrain

FOX3A Variant Common in Centarians (ie Real Longevity Gene?)

A variation in the gene FOXO3A has a positive effect on the life expectancy of humans, and is found much more often in people living to 100 and beyond – moreover, this appears to be true worldwide. A research group in the Faculty of Medicine at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel (CAU) has now confirmed this assumption by comparing DNA samples taken from 388 German centenarians with those from 731 younger people. The results of the study appear this week in the prestigious American scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ("PNAS").

Previously, in September 2008, an American research team led by Bradley J. Willcox had published in PNAS a study that indicated a higher frequency of this genetic variation in long-lived Americans of Japanese origin (ages 95 and above). Professor Almut Nebel, the scientific leader of the "Research Group for Healthy Ageing" at Kiel, comments: "That published result is only of scientific value if it can be confirmed in a study with an independently chosen sample population. Without that there must still remain a tinge of doubt. We have now eliminated that uncertainty about the connection between FOXO3A and longevity, both by our results from the German sample study and by the support from our French partners in Paris, whose research on French centenarians showed the same trend. This discovery is of particular importance as there are genetic differences between Japanese and European people. We can now conclude that this gene is probably important as a factor in longevity throughout the world."

FOXO3A is of great interest for genetic research on ageing, since it was reported in the 1990s that the gene was connected with ageing processes in worms and flies. It is because of those observations that the Kiel research group at the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology has been working for a long time on variations of this gene in humans.

"The most difficult problem is to get enough old people, especially those aged 100 or more, to take part in such a study. Interestingly, the genetic effects are much more evident in 100-year-olds than in 95-year-olds", notes the first author of the report, Dr. Friederike Flachsbart of the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology at Kiel University.

This is probably the one time in my life I am really happy that gene therapy is still very much a research treatment: ie no Boomers 43v3r. whew.

2 Earth Radius "Terrestrial" ExoPlanet Found

The CoRoT satellite has discovered a planet only twice as large as the Earth orbiting a star slightly smaller than the Sun. It is the smallest extrasolar planet (planet outside our solar system) whose radius has ever been measured. The planet's composition is not yet certain, but it is probably made predominantly of rock and water. It orbits its host star in 20 hours, which is the shortest orbital period of all exoplanets found so far. Astronomers infer its temperature must be so high (over 1000 degrees C) that it should be covered in lava or superheated water vapour.

Most of the 330 or so exoplanets discovered so far are giant planets, primarily composed of gas, like Jupiter and Neptune. This new object, named CoRoT-Exo-7b, is very different. "Finding such a small planet wasn't a complete surprise", says Dr Daniel Rouan, from LESIA in Paris, who announced the discovery today at a conference in Paris. Dr Alain Leger from the Institut d'Astrophysique de Marseille, leader of the discovery paper, explains: "It could be an example of a so-called ocean planet, whose existence was predicted some years ago: a Neptune-like planet, made of ice around a rocky core, drifts so close to its star, the ice the melting to form a fluid envelope."

I'm meeting with a guy later today that is involved in a terrestrial exoplanet hunt. I'll see what he says. Here's a link the finding project's website CoRoT Exo-7b. Might we actually see a true terrestrial within two years? O:)

Iran, Space Faring Power

Stinking Persians!!!

Or...Romans at Dura-Europas Killed By Chemical Weapons?

A cramped tunnel beneath a Middle Eastern fort might have produced the oldest evidence of chemical warfare, according to a CSI-style review of archival records.

Presented at the recent meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America, the review focused on the dramatic remains of 20 Roman soldiers unearthed in the 1930s in the city of Dura-Europos, Syria.

Sitting on a cliff overlooking the Euphrates River, the Roman fort at Dura was the site of a violent siege by the powerful Persian Empire around 256 A.D.

No historical record of the battle exists, but archaeological remains have helped piece together the action.

I think I am going to need to see a few more bits of evidence (or just the paper), but if its true, that's quite impressive. The Later Romans had Greek Fire, so its very possible that the Persians had their own weapons of nastiness.

Islands Fertilize the Oceans

An experiment to study the effects of naturally deposited iron in the Southern Ocean has filled in a key piece of the puzzle surrounding iron's role in locking atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in the ocean. The research, conducted by an international team led by Raymond Pollard of the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, and included Matthew Charette, a marine chemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), found that natural iron fertilization enhanced the export of carbon to the deep ocean. The research was published January 29, 2009, in the journal Nature.

Scientists have generally accepted the fact that biological productivity in large areas of the Southern Ocean is limited by the supply of iron, an important micronutrient for phytoplankton. However, downstream of ocean islands in this study area, massive phytoplankton blooms have been observed, leading to the idea that the islands themselves are somehow fertilizing the ocean with iron. The team showed that this natural iron fertilization enhanced phytoplankton growth and productivity and the amount of carbon exported from the surface layer (100 meters) by two to three times. Moreover, they found that the amount of carbon stored at 3,000 meters and in the sediment was similarly two to three times higher beneath the natural fertilized region than for the nearby iron-poor region.

"This work demonstrated for the first time that Southern Ocean phytoplankton blooms fueled by natural sources of iron have the potential to sequester carbon in the deep ocean," said Charette.

The team conducted their experiment in 2004-2005 on the seas around the Crozet Islands and Plateau at the northern boundary of the Southern Ocean, about 1,400 miles (2,200 kilometers) southeast of South Africa. These seas provided a natural laboratory, because each spring the waters north of Crozet experience an enormous bloom containing billions of individual phytoplankton and covering 120,000 square kilometers (the size of Ireland). In contrast, the area south of Crozet experiences only a small, short bloom later in the season.

"Our first question was, 'where does the iron come from?'" said Charette. "Airborne dust wasn't the solution — there isn't enough exposed soil on Crozet for winds to carry iron from the island to the deep water where the bloom occurs. While other studies concluded that upwelling from the deep ocean was the main source of the iron, we wanted to test the hypothesis that the iron was coming from the island itself and the iron-rich sediments in the shallow water and the plateau area around it."

Since the currents move from south to north over Crozet, the researchers reasoned that iron could be entrained in the water column as it flows over the plateau. First, they needed a way to understand how long it would take iron to travel from the island's shore to the bloom site and if the rate of supply was enough to kick-start and sustain the bloom for several months. Iron concentrations in the water wouldn't tell them where it came from, so the team sampled waters around Crozet looking for naturally-occurring radium isotopes, which, like iron, originate in the sediments and can therefore be used to quantify the amount of iron that the islands and surrounding sediments can supply to the bloom area. The decaying isotopes provided a built-in clock for the investigators to determine how quickly the water moves over the plateau and into deeper water. The distribution of radium in the water column demonstrated that the source of the iron was the island and the sediments in the shallow water around it and the plateau.

A second question the team sought to answer was whether the differences in the blooms between the north and south sides of Crozet would result in greater amounts of carbon held in the deep ocean. Using sediment traps and sediment cores, the researchers uncovered the first evidence that carbon deposited at 3,000 meters and in the sediment was two to three times higher beneath the natural fertilized region than for the nearby iron-poor region. In addition, the sediment record shows that this has been so throughout the Holocene (about 10,000 years ago until present).

No time to comment today.

Russians Pitch Vaporware Space Station

The Russian space agency (Roscosmos) has announced that it will lobby Moscow with a proposal that would see the construction of a new Russian space station in low-Earth orbit. Also, the agency has expressed a desire to extend the operational lifespan of the International Space Station (ISS) until 2020 (the outpost is set for retirement in 2015). Building a Russian space station will aid Russia's desire to kick-start their lunar program, possibly acting as a staging post for future missions to Mars…

oy.

This is probably about as likely as Kliper being funded.

I'm Only Happy When It Rains! (on Titan)

Recent images of Titan from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft affirm the presence of lakes of liquid hydrocarbons by capturing changes in the lakes brought on by rainfall.

For several years, Cassini scientists have suspected that dark areas near the north and south poles of Saturn’s largest satellite might be liquid-filled lakes. An analysis published today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters of recent pictures of Titan's south polar region reveals new lake features not seen in images of the same region taken a year earlier. The presence of extensive cloud systems covering the area in the intervening year suggests that the new lakes could be the result of a large rainstorm and that some lakes may thus owe their presence, size and distribution across Titan’s surface to the moon’s weather and changing seasons.

The high-resolution cameras of Cassini’s Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) have now surveyed nearly all of Titan’s surface at a global scale. An updated Titan map, being released today by the Cassini Imaging Team, includes the first near-infrared images of the leading hemisphere portion of Titan’s northern "lake district” captured on Aug. 15-16, 2008. (The leading hemisphere of a moon is that which always points in the direction of motion as the moon orbits the planet.) These ISS images complement existing high-resolution data from Cassini’s Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) and RADAR instruments.

Such observations have documented greater stores of liquid methane in the northern hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere. And, as the northern hemisphere moves toward summer, Cassini scientists predict large convective cloud systems will form there and precipitation greater than that inferred in the south could further fill the northern lakes with hydrocarbons.

Way kewl! I am really excited about what this Titanian summer might bring!

Hat tip to The Gish Bar Times.

Water Jet Pack!

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New Mexico Better Than Most States for Good Teachers!?!

Which states are which is just... bizarre.