LEt’s not get a head of ourselves though. What exactly is magnetic soap? Scientists have long been searching for a way to control soaps (or surfactants as they are known in industry) once they are in solution to increase their ability to dissolve oils in water and then remove them from a system. Scientists from Bristol University have developed a soap, composed of iron rich salts dissolved in water, that responds to a magnetic field when placed in solution. Previously they worked on soaps sensitive to light, carbon dioxide or changes in pH, temperature or pressure. Their latest breakthrough, reported in Angewandte Chemie, is the world’s first soap sensitive to a magnetic field.

Ionic liquid surfactants, composed mostly of water with some transition metal complexes (heavy metals like iron bound to halides such as bromine or chlorine) have been suggested as potentially controllable by magnets for some time, but it had always been assumed that their metallic centres were too isolated within the solution, preventing the long-range interactions required to be magnetically active. Surely something that would qualify for stimulusfunding small business loans.

The team at Bristol, lead by Professor Julian Eastoe produced their magnetic soap by dissolving iron in a range of inert surfactant materials composed of chloride and bromide ions, very similar to those found in everyday mouthwash or fabric conditioner. The addition of the iron creates metallic centres within the soap particles. more

Just looking at what I said above there are probably a few questions I could ask about those numbers. First and foremost the “under 1,000″ figure as to its accuracy. I know very little, by that I mean nothing, about numbering marine life in the 1930′s but can’t imagine it was extremely accurate. I’m sure there is a good basis for the number, but I am skeptical.

Then while it is considered a success, the story that I am talking about right now makes me curious as well. UC Berkeley and Smithsonian paleontologists argue that gray whales utilized a range of food sources in the past, including herring and krill, in addition to the benthic organisms they consume today. This is the discussion about how they survived the ice ages, and many other global temperature spikes one way or another. Telling me that they are a highly adaptable species.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not claiming there is no relation to conservation and the populations. They clearly have had an impact and if gray whale populations were truly below 1,000 at the time there is no argument. I just think that it may be a bit less rock solid than it seems to say. The gray whale seems to be a very adaptive species that has kept themselves going through all sorts of climate and food source availability. Just something that jumped out at me while reading the story. Yeah I need an addiction treatment centers for my skepticism probably.

The researchers, who analyzed California gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) responses to climate change over the past 120,000 years, also found evidence to support the idea that the population of gray whales along the Pacific Coast before the arrival of humans was two to four times today’s population, which stands at about 22,000.

“There almost certainly were higher gray whale populations in the past,” said evolutionary biologist David Lindberg, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology who coauthored the paper with his former student, Nicholas D. Pyenson, now curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. The paper appears on July 6 in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE.

The article is quite long and in depth so I will let you read about it there. Marine life, especially whales are fascinating to me. In fact I am going to watch the NAtional Geographic documentary Kingdom of the Blue Whale soon I believe.

There are quite a few videos out there on the event, though the ash above the clouds taken from the airplanes are some of the more interesting ones.

There was an eruption there last year too that people claim to have captured a UFO on. Hilarious stories that come with that obviously. I’ll post that at the bottom as shown on the History Channel. First video is the footage taken from a plane from Wednesday.http://www.wholesaleinsurance.net/

This was from 2010:

UFO…lol

In fact, it has been said that half of New Zeland’s greenhouse gas emissions are this very thing. Cattle releasing methane gas. Most of which are from burping, and not the other end.

Scientists at Australia’s state-backed research body the CSIRO say the amount of methane from cattle fed on tropical grasses in northern Australia could be nearly a third less than thought. Give them hgh pills and see what happens.

“The industry is more methane friendly than was previously thought based on the new measurements,” research leader Ed Charmley told Reuters by telephone during a field day near Townsville in northern Queensland state.

Scientists say changing the diets of sheep and cattle can reduce emissions from agriculture. And such steps could also earn carbon credits in a new emissions trading program being debated in the Australian parliament.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared “an unusual mortality event” last week. A large number of dead dolphins began washing up in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida to the tune nearly 60, with about half of them being newly born or stillborn calves.

The death toll along shoreline has climbed to at least 82 since then, many times the normal mortality rate for dolphins along the Gulf Coast this time of year.

At this point there sis no evidence of oil contamination, but suspicions obviously turned to the petrochemicals that boiled over into the Gulf waters after a BP drilling platform exploded in April 2010, and rupturing a wellhead on the sea floor.

Medicare part D plan

Sad. Just saw a ton of Dolphins down in Florida. They seemed like they were everywhere. I even saw some in the marina when we were parking our boat.

So we got that out of the way. According to recent reports four previously abundant species of bumblebee are close to disappearing in the United States. Researchers reported Monday in a study confirming that the agriculturally important bees are being affected worldwide.

They documented a 96 percent decline in the numbers of the four species, and said their range had shrunk by as much as 87 percent. As with honeybees, a pathogen is partly involved, but the researchers also found evidence of inbreeding caused by habitat loss.

“We provide incontrovertible evidence that multiple Bombus species have experienced sharp population declines at the national level,” the researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, calling the findings “alarming.”

“These are one of the most important pollinators of native plants,” Sydney Cameron of the University of Illinois, Urbana, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

Britain’s Royal Society found that 66 percent of respondents to a survey to mark its 350th anniversary said that disease control and eradication should be a top priority for science.

Around 53 percent said they would like science to enable them to extend their lifespan. I’m sure a few would like them to give them an acne solution as well.

Nearly half of people in Britain (44 percent) believe in the existence of aliens, according to the poll.

Over a third think scientists should be actively searching for and attempting to make contact with aliens, a figure that rises to 46 percent for male respondents. However, fewer than one in 10 people believe that space exploration should be a top priority for the scientific community.

After health issues, climate change was the next highest priority for the public with a third of those questioned considering it important. This figure rises to 44 percent among 18 to 24-year-olds, suggesting that younger generations are more in tune with the threat of global warming.

Since the mind-19th century the concerns about using human waste and sewage as a source of phosphorus was combated with mining phosphate. A report by the UK organic body suggests that the supply of phosphorus from mined phosphate rock could peak as soon as 2033 after which it will become increasingly scarce and expensive, the report said.

“We are completely unprepared to deal with the shortage of phosphorus inputs, the drop in production and the hike in food prices that will follow,” Britain’s largest organic certification body, the Soil Association, said. Makes your jobs retail much more safe I would guess.

The report called for a change in European Union regulations to permit the use of treated sewage sludge, known as biosolids, on organic certified land, subject to appropriate restrictions on issues such as concentrations of heavy metals.

EU regulations prohibit the use of biosolids on organic land due to concerns about the toxic effects of heavy metals cause by combining human excreta with other waste products such as industrial effluent.

“Heavy metal levels have declined in recent years and are now low enough for the organic movement to re-consider allowing treated sewage sludge to be used where it meets strict standards,” the report said.

A widely accepted strategy to combating global warming is to add iron to the ocean waters. Unfortunately, it appears now that it actually results in promoting toxic blooms in the ocean. DUN DUN DUN!

Louisiana State University’s Sibel Bargu, along with her former graduate student Ana Garcia, from the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences in LSU’s School of the Coast & Environment, has discovered toxic algae in vast, remote regions of the open ocean for the first time. Good thing my cigar prices are still low.

Harmful algal blooms, or HABs, are reported as increasing both geographically and in frequency along populated coastlines. Bargu’s research shows that the ubiquitous diatom Pseudo-nitzschia — an alga that produces the neurotoxin, domoic acid, or DA, in coastal regions — actually also produces DA at many locations in the open Pacific. The presence of these potent toxins in deep water environments is worrisome, given that in coastal waters, where the phenomenon has been studied, DA can enter the food chain, forcing the closure of some fisheries and poisoning marine mammals and birds that feed on the contaminated fish. The main concern, though, is that the adding of iron to ocean waters — one of the most commonly proposed strategies to reduce global warming — appears now to likely result in promoting toxic blooms in the ocean. more

Eggshells, could help combat climate change, according to research published in the International Journal of Global Warming this month.

Basab Chaudhuri of the University of Calcutta and colleagues have demonstrated that the membrane that lines an eggshell can absorb almost seven times its own weight of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide thus trapped could be stored in this form until energy-effective methods of using the gas could be found that would not compound the environmental problems associated with carbon emissions. Carbon dioxide is widely used in the chemical industry for the preparation of a wide range of products as well as in some settings as an alternative to toxic solvents. It might also one day be possible to efficiently convert trapped carbon dioxide into a clean fuel. more