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Welcome to my universe.. where there is Peace University. As Fine Scientist, PhD, I write about my interest in various fields, from energy to space, chemistry, mathematics, plants, paleontology... Read More »

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A Tale Of Two Cities (by Charles Dickens) was a weekly serial publication at this time 150 years ago. My tale of two feathers is about dinosaurs and modern birds with a twist on feathers.  

Yesterday came suddenly as the Beatles sang. 

The Climate Change Act requires the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) to report annually to the Parliament on emissions reductions relative to the UK’s carbon budgets. The first report of the commttee was published yesterday.   "A step change is required in the pace of UK emissions reduction to meet carbon budgets," concluded the CCC and that "in some areas, new policy approaches will be required to deliver the Government’s Low Carbon Transition Plan." It turns out emissions data are not yet available for the initial year 2008 of the first budget. Here I include what I found, the UK pie chart for 2004 carbon dioxide emissions, with credit due to NETCEN and BBC.   

There are many super microscopes around the globe but they are not like the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). This new source has become the brightest of them all since August 2007. Some say it is more like a laser light than a flashllight in comparison with others.  

"In reaching this milestone of operating power, the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) is providing scientists with an unmatched resource for unlocking the secrets of materials at the molecular level," said US Department of Energy's William Brinkman. SNS achieved on September 18 a record one-megawatt power or about seven times of what is available at ISIS in UK.  
Soon the world will learn who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Do you remember Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon of the following announcement?

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2003

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2003 “for discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes”, with one half of the prize to
Peter Agre
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA
“for the discovery of water channels”
and one half of the prize to
Roderick MacKinnon
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, The Rockefeller University, New York, USA
“for structural and mechanistic studies of ion channels”. [1]

Two Cell Membrane Channels
"It looks, just looks fantastic," said Nicole Stott of the "very shiny ball HTV" in the "beautiful view." The United States astronaut was looking through the windows as she spoke to Houston before she and other flight engineers, Canadian Robert Thirsk and Belgian Frank De Winne, used the station’s robotic arm to grab the spacecraft and attach it to the Earth-facing port of the Harmony node. 

The H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV), launched by the H-IIB Test Flight Launch Vehicle on September 10, 2009 from the Tanegashima Space Center, was successfully berthed at the International Space Station (ISS) at at 6:26 p.m. EDT on September 18. The ingress is scheduled for 6:30-6:40 p.m. today, a day later.
What is your yardstick for climate change? Really, how do you relate climate response to human CO2 emissions?

A new yardstick is proposed by Damon Matthews, a professor in Concordia University’s Department of Geography, Planning and the Environment. With colleagues from Victoria and the U.K., Matthews used a combination of global climate models and historical climate data to derive a simple linear relationship between total cumulative emissions and global temperature change.