Common and Hazardous Air Pollutants

America's Children and the Environment: Measures of Contaminants, Body Burdens, and Illnesses — U.S. Environmental Protection Agency— (Part 1: Environmental Contaminants / Outdoor Air Pollutants)         Particulate matter in the air (often called PM-10 or PM-2.5) has been found to cause increased risk of mortality (death), hospital admissions and emergency room visits for heart and lung diseases, respiratory effects, and decreases in lung function.       Prior to 1997, the National Ambient Air Quality Standard for particulate matter was based on particulate matter measuring 10 microns or less (PM-10). In 1997, the standard was revised to address the health risks from particulate matter measuring 2.5 microns or less (PM-2.5).       Lead accumulates in bones, blood, and soft tissues of the body. Exposure to lead can affect development of the central nervous system in young children, resulting in neurobehavioral effects such as lowered IQ.       Sulfur dioxide poses particular concerns for those with asthma, who are considered to be especially susceptible to its effects, which include respiratory illness, alterations in the lung's defenses and aggravation of cardiovascular diseases.         Exposure to carbon monoxide reduces the capacity of the blood to carry oxygen, thereby decreasing the supply of oxygen to tissues and organs such as the heart. Short-term exposure can cause neurobehavioral effects and a reduction in exercise performance.         Nitrogen dioxide effects include decreased lung function and increased respiratory symptoms or illness. Nitrogen dioxide is a major contributor to the formation of ground-level ozone, which can cause a variety of respiratory health effects and increased prevalence of asthma.         Hazardous air pollutants, also known as air toxics, have been associated with a number of adverse human health effects, including cancers, asthma and other respiratory ailments, and neurological problems such as learning disabilities and hyperactivity.         The Clean Air Act identifies 188 substances as hazardous air pollutants. Examples include benzene, trichloroethylene, mercury, chromium, and dioxin.         Hazardous pollutants are emitted from sources that are grouped into three general categories: major sources, area sources, and mobile sources.         Major sources typically are large industrial facilities such as chemical manufacturing plants, refineries, and waste incinerators. These sources may release air toxics during discharge through emission stacks or from equipment leaks.         Area sources typically are smaller stationary facilities such as dry cleaners. Collectively their emissions can be of concern — particularly where large numbers of sources are located in heavily populated areas.         Mobile sources include both on-road sources, such as cars, light trucks and buses, and non-road sources such as farm and construction equipment, marine engines, aircraft and locomotives.

The Hottest Thing in Theoretical Physics

The Unraveling of String Theory — Michael D. Lemonick— — August 2006— (Time Magazine)     Everyone knows that string theory is the hottest thing in theoretical physics. But string theory hasn't been embraced by everyone.     Physicists Peter Woit in Not Even Wrong and Lee Smolin in The Trouble with Physics both argue that string theory is largely a fad propped up by practitioners who tend to be arrogantly dismissive of anyone who dare suggest that the emperor has no clothes.       The two most important ideas of 20th century physics, relativity and quantum theory, were known to be fundamentally incompatible.         Quantum theory describes the universe as intrinsically discontinuous: energy, for example, can come in bits just so small, but no smaller. Relativity treats time and space and gravity as a smooth, unbroken continuum.             The solution: to think of the basic units of matter and energy not as particles but as minuscule, vibrating loops and snippets of stuff resembling string, which turn out to exist not just in our familiar four dimensions of space and time but in 10 or more dimensions.         This bizarre-seeming scheme appeared on first blush to explain why particles have the characteristics they do. It also included a quantum version of gravity and thus of relativity.         But: superstrings have proved a lot more complex than anyone expected. The mathematics is excruciatingly tough, and when problems arise, the solutions often introduce yet another layer of complexity.         The new, improved theory posits a nearly infinite number of different possible universes, with no way of showing that ours is more likely than any of the others.                The string theory’s idea of infinite universes is currently in vogue among some astronomers as well.           String theorists seem ready to abandon the essential definition of science. Is string theory too important to be hampered by old-fashioned notions of experimental proof?       In science, slow accretion of data and evidence eventually eliminates reasonable doubt, but not so with strings.       Nobody has any good idea of how to test string theory. Woit says, 'proposing speculative ideas is fine, but if they can't be tested, they're not science'.

General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory — Brian Greene— (Chapter 1: Tied Up with String)         There are two foundational pillars upon which modern physics rests.       One is Albert Einstein's general relativity, which provides a theoretical framework for understanding the universe on the largest of scales: stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and beyond to immense expanse of the universe itself.       The other is quantum mechanics, which provides a theoretical framework for understanding the universe on the smallest of scales: molecules, atoms, and all the way down to subatomic particles like electrons and quarks.       Through years of research, physicists have experimentally confirmed to almost unimaginable accuracy virtually all predictions made by each of these theories.         But: as they are currently formulated, general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot both be right.         The two theories underlying the tremendous progress of physics during the last hundred years are mutually incompatible.         In the central depths of a black hole an enormous mass is crushed to a minuscule size.       At the moment of big bang the whole of the universe erupted from a microscopic nugget whose size makes a grain of sand look colossal.              There are realms that are tiny and yet incredibly massive, therefore requiring that both quantum mechanics and general relativity simultaneously be brought to bear.         Well-posed physical questions elicit nonsensical answers from the unhappy amalgam of these two theories.         Can it really be that the universe at its most fundamental level is divided, requiring one set of laws when things are large and a different, incompatible set when things are small?         Superstring theory: this new approach to describing matter at its most fundamental level resolves the tension between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Within this new framework, general relativity and quantum mechanics require one another for the theory to make sense.

Faraday’s Force Fields

Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel — Michio Kaku— (Chapter 1: Force Fields)         In science fiction, a force field is deceptively simple: a thin, invisible yet impenetrable barrier able to deflect lasers and rockets alike.       In the same way that Edison's lightbulb revolutionized modern civilization, a force field could profoundly affect every aspect of our lives.       Bridges, superhighways, and roads could in theory be built by simply pressing a button. Entire cities could sprout instantly in the desert, with skyscrapers made entirely of force fields.       The concept of force fields originates from the work of the great nineteenth-century British scientist Michael Faraday.                  The young Faraday was fascinated by the enormous breakthroughs in uncovering the mysterious properties of two new forces: electricity and magnetism.         Faraday made a series of stunning breakthroughs that led to the creation of generators that would energize entire cities and change the course of world civilization — the key to Faraday's greatest discoveries was his "force fields."         If one places iron filings over a magnet, one finds that the iron filings create a spiderweb-like pattern that fills up all space. These are Faraday's lines of force, which graphically describe how the force fields of electricity and magnetism permeate space.         Empty space, to Faraday, was not empty at all, but was filled with lines of force that could make distant objects move.         One day in 1831, Faraday made the key breakthrough when he was moving a child's magnet over a coil of wire, without ever touching it. This meant that a magnet's invisible field could push electrons in a wire across empty space, creating a current.         Faraday's "force fields" which were previously thought to be useless, idle doodlings, were real, material forces that could move objects and generate power.         Force fields of Michael Faraday are the forces that drive modern civilization, from electric bulldozers to today's computers, Internet, and iPods.         Faraday's force fields have been an inspiration for physicists for a century and a half. Einstein was so inspired by them that he wrote his theory of gravity in terms of force fields.

The Ice Cages Melt

The World Without Us —Alan Weisman— (Chapter 16: Our Geologic Record)         180 miles northeast of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada: a very round hole half a mile wide and 1,000 feet deep. A dried-up lake.       North of the 60th parallel, Canada contains more lakes than the rest of the world combined. Nearly half of Northwest Territories isn't land at all, but water.       Ice ages gouged cavities into which ice-bergs dropped when the glaciers retreated. When they melted, these earthen kettles filled with fossil water...       Evaporation is slow in cold climates, little more precipitation falls here than in the Sahara.         But: as the permafrost thaws around these kettles, glacial water held in place by frozen soil for thousands of years is seeping away.         In the Eocene, today's lichen-covered tundra was coniferous forest.         One of the oldest mammal species on Earth still lives here, a Pleistocene relic that managed to survive because it was extraordinarily equipped to brave weather that ice-age humans preferred to escape: the musk ox.         The pelage of the musk ox, known in Inuit as qiviut, is the warmest organic fiber known. It makes them impervious to cold but became their downfall when they were all but exterminated by hunters in the early 20th century who sold their hides in Europe.         If too much of the permafrost is undone, it would thaw deeply buried ice that forms crystalline cages around methane molecules.          An estimated 400 billion tons of frozen methane deposits, known as clathrates, lie a few thousand feet beneath the tundra, and even more are found beneath the world's oceans.         That very-deep-freeze natural gas is estimated to equal all known conventional gas and oil reserves. But it is so dispersed no one has come up with an economical way to mine it.         If it all floats away once the ice cages melt, that much methane might ratchet global warming to levels unknown since the Permian extinction, 250 million years ago.

Cognitive Psychology

Mind Hacks: Tips & Tricks for Using Your Brain — Tom Stafford, Matt Webb — (Chapter 1: Inside the Brain)         It's never entirely true to say, "This bit of the brain is solely responsible for function X."       Small, isolated strokes can deactivate very specific brain regions... Seeing what these people can no longer do in these pathological cases, provides good clues into the functions of those regions of the brain.       Our decision-making systems are assembled from neurons rather than silicon. We're not software running on hardware. The two are one and the same.       Cognitive psychology is the psychology of the basic mental processes — things like perception, attention, memory, language, decision-making. It asks the question, "What are the fundamental operations on which mind is based?"             We can use neuroimaging (EEG, PET, MRI) to look inside the head at the brain, to inform how we think the brain runs the algorithms that make up the mind.         Experimental psychologists have spent more than a hundred years refining methods for getting insight into how the mind works without messing with the insides, what we call cognitive psychology.         What cognitive psychology basically tries to do: reverse engineering the basic functions of the mind by manipulating the inputs and looking at the results.         Small things have big effects and sometime big changes in circumstance can produce little obvious difference in how we respond.         People aren't consistent in the same way software or machines usually are. Two sources of variability are noise and learning.         We don't automatically respond in the same way to the same stimulus every time. This sometimes happens for no apparent reason, and we call this randomness noise.         The very act of responding first time around creates feedback that informs our response pattern for the next time... almost all actions affect future processing.         The rigor and precision of the methods developed by cognitive psychology are still vital, but now they can be used in tandem with methods to give insight into the underlying brains structure and processes that are supporting the phenomenon being investigated.

Sense-perceptions

Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries - Neil deGrasse Tyson– (Chapter 1: Coming to Our Senses)         Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure science. — Edwin P. Hubble (1889 - 1953), The Nature of Science       What, if anything, lies beyond our senses? Does there exist a way of knowing that transcends our biological interfaces with the environment?       The persistent failures of controlled, double-blind experiments to support the claims of parapsychology suggest that what's going on is nonsense rather than sixth sense.       The honing of our senses from birth through childhood allows us, as adults, to pass judgment on events and phenomena in our lives, declaring whether they "make sense."         Problem is: hardly any scientific discoveries of the past century flowed from the direct application of our five senses. They flowed from the direct application of sense-transcendent mathematics and hardware.         As a consequence: the average person, relativity, particle physics, and 10-dimensional string theory make no sense. Include in the list, black holes, worm holes, and the big bang.         A newer and higher level of "common sense" enables a scientist to think creatively and to pass judgment in the unfamiliar underworld of the atom or in the mind-bending domain of higher-dimensional space.         ... there are realities existing apart from our sense-perceptions... these realities are of greater value for us than the richest treasures of the world of experience. —Max Planck (1931)         Q: If you can't smell the carbon monoxide, then how do you know it's there? A: You drop dead.           If the sole measure of what's out there flows from your five senses then a precarious life awaits you.       Discovering new ways of knowing has always heralded new windows on the universe that tap into our growing list of nonbiological senses.       As we technologically evolve into supersentient beings, a new level of majesty and complexity in the universe reveals itself to us.

Galaxies

Turn Left at Orion: A Hundred Night Sky Objects to See in a Small Telescope —and How to Find Them   —Guy Consolmagno, Dan M. Davis, Karen Kotash Sepp, Anne Drogin, Mary Lynn Skirvin— (Seasonal Objects: Spring)       Galaxies are the basic units of the universe.       After the universe was created it seems to have fragmented into discrete lumps of matter, each with enough mass to make billions of stars.       A lump would condense into a galaxy, with a cloud of globular clusters swarming erratically around the galactic center, and a disk of stars orbiting the center.         Galaxies come in three general forms: elliptical galaxies, irregular galaxies, spiral galaxies.                Elliptical galaxies look like large, somewhat flattened globular clusters (a collection of tens of thousands of stars in a ball within the galaxy).         In spiral galaxies, stars are organized into two or more arms that twist around their galactic center. Spirals are the most beautiful of galaxies.           The Whirlpool Galaxy, and our own Milky Way are examples of spiral galaxies. The Whirlpool's companion may be an elliptical galaxy.         Galaxies are observed to be clumped together into clusters, which may be anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of galaxies, each tied by the gravity of others into a cloud moving together through space.                Andromeda and its companions, the Triangulum Galaxy, and the Milky Way and its companions (the Magellanic Clouds) are all part of the Local Group. The galaxies in Ursa Major and in Leo are examples of members of other groups.          All the clusters appear to be moving away from each other, implying that they are the fragments of the Big Bang that took place some twelve to fifteen thousand billion years ago.       The clusters themselves are associated into clusters of clusters called superclusters.       We don't know whether these superclusters are independent entities, like raisins in a pudding, or connected together like the stuff in a sponge around “bubbles” of empty space.

The Beginnings

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - Jared M. Diamond– (Chapter 1: Up to the Starting Line)         Human history, as something separate from the history of animals, began in Africa about 7 million years ago (estimates range from 5 to 9 million years ago).       A population of African apes broke up into several populations, of which one proceeded to evolve into several populations, of which one proceeded to evolve into modern gorillas, a second into the two modern chimps, and the third into humans.     The gorilla line apparently split off slightly before the split between the chimp and the human lines.     The evolutionary line leading to us achieved a substantially upright posture by around 4 million years ago, then began to increase in body size and in relative brain size around 2.5 million years ago.               Protohumans are generally known as Australopithecus Africanus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus, which apparently evolved into each other in that sequence.         Homo erectus, around 1.7 million years ago, was close to us modern humans in body size, but its brain size was still barely half of ours.         Stone tools became common around 2.5 million years ago, but they were merely the crudest of flaked or battered stones.         The first human ancestor to spread beyond Africa was Homo erectus, as is attested by fossils discovered on the Southeast Asian island of Java and conventionally known as Java man.                African and European skulls of half a million years ago were sufficiently similar to skulls of us moderns that they are classified in our species, Homo sapiens, instead of in Homo erectus.          The earliest unquestioned evidence of humans in Europe stems from around half a million years ago, but there are claims of an earlier presence.         11,000 B.C. This date corresponds approximately to the beginnings of village life in a few parts of the world, the first undisputed peopling of the Americas, the start of the Pleistocene Era and last Ice Age.         Plant and animal domestication began in at least one part of the world within a few thousand years of the start of the Recent Era 13,000 years ago.

Glimpsing the Mind of God

The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? - Paul Davies – (Chapter 1: The Big Questions)         The great questions of existence: Why are we here? How did the universe begin? How will it end? How is the world put together? Why is it the way it is?       Observations made using satellites, the Hubble Space Telescope, and sophisticated ground-based instruments have combined to transform our view of the universe and the place of human beings within it.       One of the most significant facts — arguably the most significant fact — about the universe is that we are part of it.       Carbon is the key life-giving element, but oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus are crucial too. Liquid water is another essential ingredient.                If almost any of the basic features of the universe, from the properties of atoms to the distribution of the galaxies, were different, life would very probably be impossible.         Like the porridge in the tale of Goldilocks and the three bears, the universe seems to be "just right" for life, in many intriguing ways.         ...the everyday world observed through our senses represents only the surface manifestation of a deeper hidden reality, where the answers to the great questions of existence should be sought.           ...about 350 years ago, the greatest magician who ever lived finally stumbled on the key to the universe — a cosmic code that would open the floodgates of knowledge. This was Isaac Newton —               The particular brand of "magic" employed by the early scientists involved hitherto unfamiliar and specialized procedures, such as manipulating mathematical symbols on pieces of paper and coaxing matter to behave in strange ways.          Newton, Galileo, and other early scientists treated their investigations as a religious quest. They thought that by exposing the patterns woven into the processes of nature they truly were glimpsing the mind of God.         ...beneath the surface hubbub of natural phenomena lies an abstract order, an order that can't be seen or heard or felt, but deduced.         Somehow the universe has engineered, not just its own awareness, but also its own comprehension. Mindless, blundering atoms have conspired to make not just life, not just mind, but understanding.

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