Louis_J_Sheehan

Once you get past their unfeeling headline, they show they are all mush inside. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire1.blogspot.com

Denver stage There are free bikes downtown, some new wind power facilities. Green key-cards at the hotels. But more important, really, was the fact that Hillary dedicated one of the only substantive portions of her speech (most of it was ‘we made 18 million cracks in that glass ceiling, which changed that ceiling into a mosaic of caring, and Harriet Tubman said you’ve got to keep banging your head through that mosaic etc etc’) to talk about green-collar jobs. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire1.blogspot.com

That speech did make a little worried about party unity though. I mean, everybody is praising it as a great speech, but wasn’t it kind of, I am great, I laid waste in the primary, I proved something, and oh yeah, vote for Barack? Because while he may not be a woman, like me, the man is at least black, like Harriet Tubman?
Louis J. Sheehan.

Louis J. Sheehan.
President Bush has proposed protecting vast swaths of marine territory in the South Pacific from commercial fishing and offshore drilling, in a move that some environmentalists have said could earn him a legacy as the “Teddy Roosevelt of the seas.” This week, Bush is expected to ask his Cabinet for comments on conservation proposals for marine ecosystems around the Northern Mariana islands, the Line Islands, and American Samoa. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com

While the Bush administration’s environmental record has generally received harsh criticism from environmentalists, these proposals are being seen as a cause for celebration. “We have every expectation that the president will move forward on protecting these places sometime in the fall,” said Diane Regas, ocean program director at Environmental Defense Fund. “Today, we put the champagne on ice, and we will pop it open.” Two years ago, the president made a huge swath of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands a national monument, barring fishing, oil and gas extraction and tourism from its waters and coral reefs. The area is the single largest conservation area on the planet [AP]. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com

The new areas suggested for protection include the deepest place on the Earth’s surface, the 36,000-foot-deep Marianas Trench. The waters around the three island chains are rich in biodiversity, and are home to endangered sea turtles, coral reefs, and giant coconut crabs. “These vast Pacific areas are nearly three times the size of Texas,” said Elliott Norse, founder and President of Marine Conservation Biology Institute. “Countless seabirds, dolphins, fishes, corals and tiny things as yet undiscovered could survive as a result, free of the threats that are eliminating them elsewhere” [AP].

Last year, the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality invited a small number of ocean advocates to an unusual, closed-door meeting to discuss the idea. The White House asked them to help identify potential reserves in waters within the United States’ “exclusive economic zone,” which extends 200 nautical miles out from the mainland and U.S.-owned islands around the world [NPR News]. President Bush can use the 1906 Antiquities Act to designate the areas as “marine monuments,” which would allow him to establish these conservation areas quickly, without congressional approval.

Image: flickr/benmiller23

August 25th, 2008 Tags: biodiversity, coral reefs, ecosystems, ocean, oil & gas
by Eliza Strickland in Environment | 3 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >
3 Responses to “President Bush Could Earn a “Blue Legacy” With Marine Conservation Plan”

1. Al Jacobs Says:
August 25th, 2008 at 8:01 pm

Ahhhh ! The least environmentally sensitive administration since WWII wants to save critters and coral in the Pacific ? Remember that Johnston Atoll was and a U.S. nuclear weapons test site, a missile launch site for some of the first spy satellites, and later the site of the Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System (JACADS). I am sure that the military left behind “objects of historic and scientific” interest. Too bad Cheney/ Bush are more concerned about letting sleeping dogs lie rather than protecting the planet. Indeed, if easily recoverable resources were found there they would quickly change their tune.
2. PK Says:
August 26th, 2008 at 8:07 pm

HAHA! Bush the “Teddy Roosevelt of the seas.” what a joke! How about Bush the Douche Bag of the U.S?
3. Juggernaut Says:
August 27th, 2008 at 4:12 pm

Bush has been so vehemently hated since Gore’s blatant attempt to steal the election failed, that nothing he does will be acceptable to the Left. If man-made global warming/cooling/climate change were real and he solved the problem, he would still be excoriated by the “useful idiots” known as liberals. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com

The LA Times has a piece about how the Dems are trying to wrest the Rocky Mountain West from the GOP largely by emphasizing green issues. Basically, the strategy is to be, like, the GOP makes messes, financial and environmental. We’ll clean them up, because we’re not burdened with their impractical neocon craziness.

Joe Biden It’s kind of cool to see the Democratic party is able to cast itself as the pragmatist, non-ideological one now. The No More Drama party.

Obama’s VP pick, Sen. Joe Biden, gave an interview to Grist this weekend where he flashed his green cred. He was one of the first congressmen to introduce a climate change bill, back in the ’80s. If he can sell his native Pennsylvania on the green-collar jobs concept, and play attack dog on McCain’s greenwashing, he’ll be earning his keep.

Louis J. Sheehan.

Louis J. Sheehan.
York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg made news yesterday when he proposed perching windmills on top of the city’s skyscrapers and bridges, and building windfarms off the coasts of Queens and Brooklyn. The move would make the city less dependent on the national energy grid, he said, and would also express the city’s commitment to renewable energy. As Bloomberg put it: “I would think that it would be a thing of beauty if, when Lady Liberty looks out on the horizon, she not only welcomes new immigrants to our shores, but lights their way with a torch powered by an ocean wind farm” [Washington Post]. http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com

However, the day after the announcement, experts are expressing numerous doubts over the plan’s feasibility. Skyscrapers would have to be designed — or retrofitted at great cost — to accommodate the extra weight, vibration and swaying of the turbines. Insurers would have to be persuaded that turbines are worth the risk. And New York is not a particularly windy city, so a few buildings facing New York Harbor might be the only sites that make sense [The New York Times]. And while new, smaller, eggbeater-shaped windmills don’t pose the same major construction hurdles, they may not produce enough electricity to make them worth the cost.

Few U.S. cities have experimented with wind power, because tall buildings tend to disrupt air currents. “Turbulence makes urban wind development difficult,” said Christine Real de Azua, spokeswoman for the American Wind Energy Association. “New York is more likely to get offshore wind parks than on top of buildings or the Brooklyn Bridge” [Bloomberg]. But U.S. energy companies have been slow to develop offshore windfarms, citing high startup costs and low profits. Last year, the Long Island Power Authority canceled a plan to build 140 offshore wind turbines when costs soared to $800 million.

Faced with a barrage of criticism, Bloomberg backed away from his proposal today, saying that windmills are just one part of the city’s energy strategy, which also includes increasing solar and tidal power and pushing for energy conservation. There are many hurdles to the windmill plan, Bloomberg admitted, including irritable New Yorkers who don’t want the skyline altered. “There are aesthetic considerations,” Bloomberg said. “No. 2, I have absolutely no idea whether that makes any sense from a scientific, from a practical point of view” [AP].

Meanwhile, DISCOVER checks out the latest wind power technology in the article, “Wind Turbine That Imitates Flippers Could Increase Efficiency.”

Image: flickr/rasmithuk

August 21st, 2008 Tags: Bloomberg, New York City, wind power
by Eliza Strickland in Environment | 10 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >
10 Responses to “Windmills on NYC Skyscrapers Sound Cool, but Wouldn’t Work”

1. Damian Says:
August 21st, 2008 at 2:22 pm

Great article. Don’t I recall that one of the preliminary designs for the rebuilt WTC would have involved two towers, with the upper 20 floors of each tower consisting of an enclosed wind turbine? I wonder if that proposal was viable, or whether it was similarly ill conceived.
2. Eliza Strickland Says:
August 21st, 2008 at 3:53 pm http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com

You remember right. The “Freedom Tower” was originally slated to have 8 vertical wind turbines in an open-air structure towards the top, which were meant to supply some of the building’s power. But NY Governor Pataki worried that the blades would slice up birds, and others worried that the turbines would freeze in the winter, so the whole concept was eventually scrapped.
3. Jef Says:
August 21st, 2008 at 4:42 pm

I remember seeing these vertical axis turbines on a television program. I’m not sure if that’s what they meant by ‘eggbeater’ but they seem like a good partial solution. I found a promotional pdf that explains it rather well: http://www.govenergy.com/2006/pdfs/Becker_3A.pdf
As far as harnessing wind in urban settings, I haven’t seen any better ideas yet.
4. Damian Says:
August 21st, 2008 at 4:43 pm http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com

If they were worried about the blades on just Freedom Tower slicing up birds and freezing in the winter, how about an entire _city_ worth of frozen-solid-turkey-chopping whirligigs?

On the other hand, it would be the most interesting skyline in human history.
5. Evrim Says:
August 21st, 2008 at 9:47 pm

If Man can step on the moon, why can’t be futuristic enough to support Bloomberg and atleast do not disagree with his ill-visioned aim to lace a wind turbine on each building. Why? and Why Not? Somebody has to study the social, structural, economic, and legal feasibility.
6. Todd Says:
August 22nd, 2008 at 11:24 am

I love how one of the arguements against wind power is that it’s ugly. You know what else is ugly? An energy crisis.
7. Christopher Wilson Says:
August 22nd, 2008 at 3:45 pm

New York does not have the same intensity of wind that one finds in many wind-farm areas. But there is plenty of wind for a number of custom wind-turbine designs throughout the city, designs that are lightweight, with vibration dampers and bird safety features included. Hold competitions for new designs with substantial cash prizes, and the appropriate engineering will come, I guarantee it. When we depend on old ideas and existing technology, that’s what we get. New skyscrapers, by their shape, permit many new approaches to engineering wind power. Let New York show how it CAN be done, and put a sock in the mouth of the nay-sayers; they are the ones who are pulling this country down into a miasma of insoluble problems and perpetual mediocrity!
8. Joe Says:
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:16 pm http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com

I’m with Todd. Have any of the people who complain about the looks of windmills ever seen an open pit coal mine?
9. Bernard Gilland Says:
August 24th, 2008 at 5:05 pm

Windpower, in New York or anywhere else, is a stupid nonsolution to the energy problem. It is a fluctuating energy source that requires backup from fossil fueled power plants. It would be far more sensible to build a nuclear power plant in Central Park.
10. Jef Says:
August 25th, 2008 at 11:05 am

You should look at the link I put up earlier. I’m not associated with that company, so I’m not spamming, but they don’t kill birds and they don’t look bad and, though they never go very fast, the fluctuation is very little as they’re moving rather constantly in the type of twisting, gusting wind you find in a city. They’re not loud or heavy and they don’t cause very many vibrations. They’re not expensive, particularly on upkeep. Really, the only disadvantage is that the power output is far from impressive. But hey, put enough partial solutions together it starts looking like a solution. http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com

Louis J. Sheehan

The collective activity of huge assemblies of brain cells, as reflected in their rhythmic electrical discharges, contributes to the derailed perceptions and thoughts of schizophrenia as well as to the heightened mental states achieved by experienced meditators, two new studies find. http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com

Results from both investigations, slated to appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, coincide with earlier reports that a certain form of synchronized electrical activity in groups of brain cells fosters perception, memory, and consciousness (SN: 3/11/00, p. 167: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20000311/fob7.asp).

All these studies rely on electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings of the rate and intensity at which cells on the brain’s surface send messages. Of particular interest are the gamma waves produced when masses of neurons emit their electrical signals around 40 times a second.

Many neuroscientists suspect that gamma activity occurs when various chemical messengers foster efficient communication across large swaths of brain tissue.

“The absence of gamma activity is related to dysfunctional neural circuits that cause some of the core symptoms of schizophrenia,” reports psychiatrist Robert W. McCarley of Harvard Medical School in Boston, who directed one of the new studies.

McCarley’s team studied 20 people with schizophrenia and 20 who had no mental disorder. As EEG data were collected, participants looked at either of two computer-screen images containing four partial circles resembling open-mouthed Pacman figures. In one image, the shapes were placed and oriented to create the illusion of a square in the center of the figures. Each volunteer pressed a key to signal perception of the square.

Study volunteers with schizophrenia made substantially more errors and took longer to respond than the others did. During this task, only the mentally healthy volunteers exhibited gamma activity at the back of the brain, where much visual processing occurs. In the people with schizophrenia, neural synchronization also occurred but at a frequency below the gamma range, indicating weaker integration of critical neural networks. Those who had experienced intense hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thinking showed the lowest-frequency synchronization.

Although the volunteers with schizophrenia had for years taken various antipsychotic medications that diminished their symptoms, none of the drugs had pushed neural synchrony into the gamma range.

John H. Krystal, a psychiatrist at Yale University School of Medicine, says he’s “cautiously optimistic” that a focus on gamma activity will yield insights into how the brain malfunctions in schizophrenia.

In the second new study, directed by neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, gamma activity gradually expanded across the brain during meditation by eight people skilled at the practice. These individuals had undergone Buddhism-based mental training for between 15 and 40 years. Meditators who had trained for the longest time displayed the most gamma activity. http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com

Considerably smaller amounts of neural synchrony turned up during meditation in the brains of 10 college students who had just begun the practice. They had received a training session in meditation the week before testing and had then practiced the technique for 1 hour each day. http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com

The experienced practitioners also exhibited substantially more gamma activity while at rest and not meditating than the students did. Further research needs to confirm that meditation training directly cultivates this brain response, rather than that people with high gamma activity are attracted to meditation, Davidson says.

These new findings are provocative but hard to interpret, remarks neuroscientist J. Anthony Movshon of New York University. “No one has convincingly linked gamma activity to any underlying brain mechanism involved in thinking or perception,” Movshon says.

Nonetheless, neural synchrony “could be a gateway to understanding all sorts of mental activity,” McCarley holds.

So I think plasma is a better candidate. This ionized gas is made by lightning, is what the sun’s made out of, and is even used in plasma TVs. You can contain plasma using electric and magnetic fields, which exert inward pressure to match the plasma’s outward pressure. This means you could make different shapes, like a lightsaber–esque cylinder. But there are some problems: You couldn’t create a tip, and plasma would leak and vaporize the skin off Luke Skywalker’s hands. And as with a laser, you couldn’t fit all the necessary machinery to generate the plasma into a sword handle. Plus, the beam would need to be millions of degrees and far denser, in terms of energy, than anything we have now. But if somehow you could do all that, sure enough, the lightsaber would cut through metal and bone. The fields containing plasma would repel other lightsabers, so they would work like what you see, except it would radiate a great deal of heat, about as much of the sun. Jedi would have really bad sunburns. Louis J. Sheehan

How do you think “The Force” works in the Star Wars universe, and could it exist in ours?http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com
The most difficult thing about trying to explain The Force is that it does so many different things: It can levitate objects, read others’ thoughts, influence the weak-minded, reveal visions of the past and the future, detect disturbances or presences, and even allow for life after death.

The best chance we have of explaining The Force is through the midi-chlorians, which were introduced in the new trilogy. Lucas explains these midi-chlorians as organisms that live within our cells and allow us to feel The Force. The element that seems scientifically based here is the sensing of someone strong in The Force. You can compare this to creatures living in water that generate small electrical fields. Some fish generate these fields, and these can sense when other fish come into these fields as well as the strength of the field put out by the approaching fish.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

Or maybe The Force is similar to magnetism. Birds sense magnetic fields with cells in their beaks and eyes, called cryptochromes. Birds may actually “see” the magnetic field, so you can imagine a similar kind of thing happening in Star Wars. If Darth Vader is standing in the next room, maybe you can see the emissions of The Force like a magnetic aura around him.

How practical is the transgalactic travel in the Star Wars universe?
The characters talk about moving in spaceships at “light-speed” or “making the jump into hyperspace” interchangeably, and there are some problems with that nomenclature. After all, light-speed is not very fast! If you were traveling at light-speed, it would take you over four years to reach the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, because it is over four light-years [24 trillion miles] away.

What seems to be going on in Star Wars is that they travel through so-called wormholes. Einstein’s theory of relativity tells us that we might be able to make wormholes to fold space in on itself in order to make the shortest distance between two points. All of space is warped by gravity. Think of it this way: Say space is a sheet hanging over a clothesline. If you want to get around to the other side of the sheet, you could go up to the clothesline and then down the other side, but it would be much faster just to tunnel directly between the two sides of the sheet.

Wormholes, if they exist, are probably smaller than atoms and survive for only fractions of a second. The way to make use of one theoretically is to “open” one up with a huge amount of energy and then keep it open and expand it with an exotic kind of matter. This matter would need to have negative mass or energy to exert an antigravitational force to hold the wormhole open long enough to let a spaceship pass through. This seems to be what Han Solo is doing with the Millennium Falcon when he makes [a] jump to hyperspace. You can sort of think of “light-speed” as slang in the Star Wars universe.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

Obviously, we’re very far away from any kind of technology that would take us rapidly to another star. NASA’s new Orion spaceship, which will be out in 2014, is designed just to get us back to [the] moon and [to] Mars. But someday we could have interstellar travel like they use so frequently in Star Wars.

What about laser weapons? Are we any closer to having those, and are they realistic?
Who wouldn’t want to have a blaster? They are so cool. Right now we have low-powered lasers than can blind people, or higher power ones that burn skin or clothing—kind of like a long-distance flamethrower. The most powerful lasers we have that I know of have about 2.2 megawatts of power, which can destroy enemy missiles from thousands of miles away. These are rather similar to what we see in Star Wars.

But for these lasers we need enough equipment to fill up a truck or even a building. We can’t exactly fit this laser technology into a holster just yet. The best lasers are still only 30 percent efficient and the rest of their energy is lost as heat. You also have to cool the laser down to keep it working properly, plus you need to put a lot of power in to get a lot of power out.

There are wireless TASERs now about the size of a flashlight. They send out an ultraviolet laser beam that breaks up air molecules between them and the target. This releases ions, and then electricity can be sent through the air to knock someone out, or even give them a heart attack if you’re not careful. It’s kind of similar to when Princess Leia was stunned by the storm troopers near the beginning of the first movie [Episode IV: A New Hope]. There are also prototypes of stun grenades that superheat moisture in the air, which makes an explosive flash and bang that can stun people.

Let’s talk lightsabers.
Ah, lightsabers. When I first saw Star Wars, I was 17 years old, and I thought they were laser beams. But that doesn’t make any sense because a laser beam wouldn’t come to a point after a few feet. Also, the laser wouldn’t be visible unless there was a lot of dust in the air to scatter light and illuminate the beam. Plus, laser lightsabers would pass through each other like flashlight beams, which wouldn’t make for a very fun fight.

Louis J. Sheehan

Louis J. Sheehan. No object in space is more mysterious—and more psychologically menacing—than a black hole. Once known as a frozen star, a black hole is formed when a massive star burns out and collapses upon itself, ultimately producing gravitational energy so powerful that not even light can escape from it. Although physicists can infer the existence of black holes in space, they cannot directly observe them. Yet making mini black holes may be possible when the world’s largest particle accelerator—the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—goes online outside Geneva, Switzerland. At the heart of the new machine is a phenomenal 17-mile circular tunnel where particles will smash together at nearly the speed of light, producing temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the core of the sun. Physicists will observe the collisions not only for clues to fundamental constituents of matter, hidden dimensions, and the elusive Higgs boson—the hypothetical particle that gives matter its heft—but also for tiny black holes winking in and out of existence. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com

But a couple of Jeremiahs would halt the fireworks before they begin. A lawsuit filed in U.S. district court in Honolulu seeks to halt the opening of the accelerator, which is funded in part by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. A similar suit was filed in 2000 against the Brookhaven National Laboratory to prevent the operation of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, an accelerator that started up that year. The charge, then as now, is that microscopic black holes produced at the collider might coalesce and engulf the earth, ending all life as we know it. LHC scientists have publicly dismissed the lawsuit as bunkum while quietly double-checking their math just to be sure. DISCOVER asked Brown University physicist Greg Landsberg, who is involved in experiments at the LHC, if we should lose any sleep over the matter.

First off, how might microscopic black holes be produced at the LHC?
When too much matter is put into too small a space, it collapses under its own gravity and forms a black hole. That’s what is happening when astronomical black holes are formed. Now, the LHC doesn’t really create much matter, but it does put a lot of energy in a very small volume, and Einstein showed that for a moving particle, the energy, not the mass, governs gravitational attraction. You might create black holes at the LHC when two particles pass very close to each other, if the gravitational interaction between them is strong enough. But this is possible only in certain models that predict the existence of extra dimensions.

What is the connection between extra dimensions and black holes?
Black hole production requires a strong gravitational attraction. But gravity is much weaker than other forces, such as electromagnetism. One way of remedying this problem is to assume the existence of extra dimensions in space accessible to the carrier of gravitational force—called the graviton—but not accessible to other particles, such as quarks, electrons, and photons. If this is the case, gravity may be fundamentally strong but still appear weak to us, as the gravitons spend most of their time in the extra space and rarely cross into our world.

Imagine a very long and thin straw. If you are observing it from far away, you don’t really resolve the fact that the straw has the second curled-up dimension, its circumference. The straw appears to you as a line—that is, one-dimensional. However, if you approach the straw at a distance comparable to its radius, you would start resolving its second dimension and see that it is truly two-dimensional. Pretty much the same way, when two particles are close to one another, they start feeling gravity from extra dimensions and thus feel the true, undiluted gravitational pull. That’s basically the framework in which it turns out that black hole production at the LHC is a possibility. But one should understand that this is just one model. Whether it’s true or not is anybody’s guess.

How would microscopic black holes be observed?
They would emit light that is much, much hotter than, say, light coming from the stars or sun, because their temperature is many orders of magnitude greater. They would emit high-energy gamma rays, and they could emit all sorts of species of particles, such as electrons and muons, that we could detect.

Can we be sure that a black hole created at the LHC wouldn’t expand and swallow the earth?
I think the honest answer to this question is yes. The black holes that would be produced at the LHC must also be produced by the hundreds every day due to energetic cosmic rays bombarding our earth. When cosmic rays smash into particles of earth material, it’s the same type of collision that happens in the LHC. So the very fact that we exist here on earth to talk about these things tells us that even if black holes are produced, pretty much everything is very safe. Either black holes are not produced at all, or they decay very, very quickly due to Hawking radiation or an equivalent mechanism.

What exactly is Hawking radiation?
Stephen Hawking showed in the early 1970s that black holes are not completely black. They have a slight tint of gray, if you will. That means black holes do not just suck everything in—or accrete, as they call it scientifically—but in fact they must radiate some energy out. This process is known as Hawking radiation.

The intensity of Hawking radiation is determined by the temperature of the black hole. The higher it is, the more intense the radiation is, just like a hot bar of metal emits much more heat than a cold one. Now it turns out that the temperature of the black hole is inversely proportional to its mass. The more massive a black hole, the cooler it is. Thus small black holes are very hot and radiate a lot, while large, astronomical black holes are extremely cold and barely radiate at all. The black holes found in the universe are so cold that it takes forever for them to evaporate, many orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe.

By contrast, black holes at the LHC would live only a fraction of a second before they radiate their mass away. This is not long enough for them to accrete anything before they disappear in a blast of radiation. These black holes would evaporate almost instantaneously, without moving by more than the size of the atomic nucleus.

Is it possible to quantify the chance of something catastrophic occurring at the LHC? http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com
The probability is never equal to zero in quantum mechanics, but you don’t worry about it if the probability is very small. There is some probability that all the air molecules in your room will suddenly cross over and end up on one half of the room and you won’t be able to breathe. But we are talking about risk management here, and I think people should be worried about probabilities that are large.

If black holes are detected at the LHC, what would it mean for physics? http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com
Above all, it would probably help us build a quantum theory of gravity, the one force that hasn’t really been explained by quantum mechanics. We have very little understanding of what the quantum theory of gravity looks like, and producing these black holes at the LHC would probably be as close as you could get to approaching the answer to this question.

Louis J. Sheehan. Would you fancy grasshopper gumbo? Perhaps mushroom hors d’oeuvres topped with a batter-dipped and lightly fried dragonfly—in season, of course—drizzled with a sauce of Dijon mustard, soy and butter? http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang

These are among recipes that self-taught insect chef Zack Lemann has whipped up as possible menu items for Bug Appétit. This restaurant offering bugged dining will be a permanent feature of the Audubon Nature Institute’s Insectarium. Celebrating insects and other arthropods, the 23,000-square-foot museum will open June 13 in New Orleans.

“For the tentative gourmand,” Lemann says he might produce chocolate-covered bugs or cookies garnished with toasted crickets. More daring diners might opt for red beans and “yikes,” he suspects, which is rice seeded with poached wax worms that “are rice-colored and rice-shaped, but quite a bit bigger.” In many instances, people will see the bug but not really taste it. Certainly, he says, “we won’t try to hide the bugs.” http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang

Curious diners who can’t make it to New Orleans can sample insect-laced cuisine at events such as Cornell University’s fall Insectapalooza, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences’ autumn BugFest or Purdue University’s spring Bug Bowl.

Or, cooks can experiment at home using insects normally destined to become food for pets like reptiles. Lemann contends that nutty-flavored crickets, in particular, can be substituted in any recipe that calls for small chopped pieces of fruit, vegetables, meat or nuts.

Louis J. Sheehan. Pluto got the boot from planethood in 2006. But one of the dwarf planet’s moons, Charon, could get an upgrade, thanks to discussions August 14 during the Great Planet Debate Conference in Laurel, Md.

“Charon is not a satellite,” Keith Noll, a planetary scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said during the meeting. “It meets the definitions of plutoid and dwarf planet, and if it weren’t orbiting Pluto, it would be a dwarf planet.”

But when the International Astronomical Union redefined planet and created the label dwarf planet, the group listed Charon as one of Pluto’s satellites — Nix and Hydra being the other two. In 2006, the IAU also wrote, “The idea that Charon might qualify to be called a dwarf planet on its own may be considered later,” as a footnote to their definitions of planet and dwarf planet.

Stirring even more controversy into Pluto’s demotion, the footnote was removed from the IAU’s statement of resolutions two days after it was published, says Harvard University astronomer Owen Gingrich, who chaired the committee that worked on defining a planet.

“Charon is one of those loose ends from the 2006 IAU conference that needs to be tied up,” Noll says. “It was one of those decisions that was stripped off and held until later because the decisions were being made in real time and time was running short.”

Charon has a diameter 1,200 kilometers, Noll pointed out at the conference. Therefore, Charon is large enough to, by its own gravity, be round, he said. And that roundness characteristic is one of the first criteria of the IAU’s definitions of planet and dwarf planet.

But Charon isn’t quite a planet either. One IAU criterion for a planet is that it clears its neighboring region of other want-to-be planets, called planetesimals. Charon has not done this since it hasn’t gotten rid of Pluto, Noll notes. So Charon could be defined as a dwarf planet, but not a planet.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

Finally, to be a dwarf planet, Charon cannot be a satellite. Charon is now considered one of Pluto’s satellites, Noll said. But, he countered, the IAU decided that when a satellite orbits its parent body, the center of gravity between the two must lie within the parent body.

That is not the case with Pluto and Charon. The center of gravity of the two lies 1,000 kilometers above Pluto’s surface. It is also important to note that Charon meets these criteria of dwarf planet and lies past Neptune, so it also fits the recent IAU definition of plutoid, Noll said.

Based on those considerations, “Charon should be reconsidered, not just for its own case,” he says, “but because of the fact that we are starting to find more and more of these binary systems in the Kuiper Belt,” the ring of dwarf planets and small solar system bodies that lie beyond Neptune. Fifty binaries similar to Pluto and Charon have been found so far with more to come, he says.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

Gingrich, however, is unsure whether Charon would get its chance for a promotion at the next IAU General Assembly, to be held in August of 2009 in Rio de Janeiro. “I don’t think it will happen in a specific vote,” he says. “We have more serious problems to deal with.”