Throw Back Thursday

Today I went to Buzzfeed and saw 20 DIY (Do It Yourself) projects; it brought back some memories.
My Mom and I did most of them, my favorite was making oobleck. Here is something we did not make, something that glows. What kid doesn’t like something that glows in the dark? Tutorial here.

But we did make rainbow cupcakes out of ginger-ale, white cake mix and of course food coloring. Below is a how to make rainbow bread.

Greenhouse gas injections may unleash earthquakes

Pumping carbon dioxide into the bowels of the Earth seems like an appealing way to ditch the greenhouse gas. But such injections could trigger earthquakes, geophysicists report November 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Petroleum companies already use CO₂ injections to flush out underground oil. Now researchers have found that such gas injections into an oil field in northwestern Texas sparked dozens of small earthquakes.

“It’s inconceivable that the injection wells weren’t contributing to these earthquakes,” says study coauthor Cliff Frohlich of the University of Texas at Austin. The study provides some of the first evidence that gas injections may lead to earthquakes.

Storms are becoming more intense, moving toward poles

Greenhouse gases emitted by human activity are strengthening storms and causing rain bands and dry zones to move poleward, scientists report November 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Climate simulations have long forecast that climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions will make rain heavier and more intense, while also pushing storms and deserts away from the equator. Observed climate patterns that match these predictions are called "fingerprints" of human activity. Researchers have struggled to find such fingerprints because weather is notoriously fickle.
In the new study, Kate Marvel and Céline Bonfils, climate scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, develop a statistical method to separate human influence from natural variation in precipitation. The researchers use the method to see whether satellite and ground-based rain measurements from 1979 to 2012 matched predicted fingerprints. Marvel and Bonfils find that storms had indeed strengthened, and both storms and deserts had migrated toward the poles.
Only human influence can account for these trends happening in tandem, Marvel and Bonfils conclude.

Surprising metals found in microbes

Look out, smartphone users: Bacteria may be after your rare earths. A microbe that lives in one of Earth’s harshest environments, sulfurous volcanic mud pits, needs one of several industrially valuable metals to make a vital enzyme. While rare earth elements have been found previously in plants and microbes, the mud-pit bacterium is the first organism known to need them for survival.
Methylacidiphilum fumariolicum makes its home in volcanic pools outside Naples, Italy, where it endures steaming-hot temperatures and mud as acidic as lemon juice. Scientists led by Huub Op den Camp, a microbiologist from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, discovered the bacterium in 2007 and brought it back to the lab, where they had trouble getting it to survive in their standard growth medium. The bacterium thrived only when the scientists added water from its original home.

To better understand the microbe, Thomas Barends, a biochemist at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany, probed the three-dimensional structure of M. fumariolicum's version of methanol dehydrogenase, a key enzyme used by the bacterium and many others that harvest energy from methane. Barends found that while previously studied methane-munching species insert a calcium atom into the enzyme, M. fumariolicum uses a different metal. But in computer simulations, he couldn’t find an element that fit into the enzyme’s structure.

Op den Camp’s team, meanwhile, had discovered that the mud pools that M. fumariolicum lives in have far more rare earth elements than do most other places where bacteria live. So they suggested Barends try cerium in his simulation. Cerium is the planet’s most abundant rare earth element but one never previously found in an enzyme. “I thought, ‘no way, that never happens in biology,’” Barends says. But he put it into his model and it worked.

To confirm the simulation results, the scientists grew the microbe with several rare earth elements and found that it thrived equally well on a diet of lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium or neodymium. The researchers also analyzed the bacteria’s methanol dehydrogenase and found traces of whichever element they had added, confirming the enzyme was storing the elements. The scientists report their findings September 12 in Environmental Microbiology.

Op den Camp and Barends now think M. fumariolicum could be just the first of many bacteria found to rely on rare earth elements. “It may be that people simply never looked,” Barends says.
The work will inspire other researchers to revisit data for hints of microbes using rare earth metals, predicts Marina Kalyuzhnaya, a microbiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “I’m quite sure we will see more papers in this area,” she says.

Chris Anthony, a retired biochemist from the University of Southampton in England who discovered methanol dehydrogenase 50 years ago, agrees that rare earth elements could be much less rare in microbiology than scientists thought. He says, “If I had a lab now I’d be running around testing everything to see if I could find them.”

Immune system follows circadian clock

Jet lag goofs up more than just sleep schedules: Tinkering with the body's clock confuses the immune system too.

In mice, a type of immune cell linked to inflammation depends on daily cycles of light and dark, researchers report in the Nov. 8 Science. The finding could help explain the connection between inflammatory diseases and chronic clock disruptions, such as those experienced by frequent fliers and night shift workers.

“This has implications for all of us,” says study author Lora Hooper, an immunologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “None of us go to sleep when the sun sets or get up when the sun rises.” Soaking up artificial light when it’s dark outside might predispose people to immune disorders such as inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, she says.

Historical events linked to changes in Earth’s temperature

The Great Depression, World Wars I and II and an international treaty restricting ozone-depleting chemicals each had measurable effects on global temperatures, scientists report November 10 in Nature Geoscience. This finding represents one of the first times scientists have linked specific economic and political events to observed changes in how fast global temperatures are rising.

Meteor explosions like this year’s Russian fireball more common than thought

Meteor impacts such as February’s explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia, the most powerful observed in a century, may occur more frequently than thought. An analysis of recorded impacts over the past two decades suggests that Chelyabinsk-sized objects strike the planet every few decades, on average, rather than once every century or two.
“There were inklings of this before, but this is the strongest statement that’s been made,” says Paul Chodas, a planetary scientist with NASA’s Near Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who was not involved in the research. If confirmed, scientists will need to reassess the risk of impacts and come up with new strategies for spotting space rocks tens of meters in diameter, which can cause widespread damage and injuries.

Strange six-tailed asteroid makes a scene

A six-tailed asteroid lurks in the rocky belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Astronomers first spotted the space rock, called P/2013 P5, as a fuzzy ball in August. That was a bit of a surprise because asteroids often appear as tiny points of light. In September, scientists used the Hubble Space Telescope to follow up on the asteroid and were shocked to see that six dusty tails shot from the space rock, giving it a cometlike appearance.
Observations taken 13 days later showed that the asteroid’s structure seemed to have rotated, the researchers report November 7 in Astrophysical Journal Letters. The team plans to continue to observe the quasi-comet asteroid to determine how the object's tails form and evolve.

Uninhabitable Earth

To determine whether a planet could support life, astronomers first look at whether it falls within its star’s habitability zone, the Goldilocks distance that is not too hot or too cold. But that range can change as a star evolves. A recent estimate of the lifetimes of the habitability zones of Earth and various exoplanets suggests Earth could become unable to support life as soon as 1.75 billion years from now, when the sun brightens before dying out.

Billions and billions of Earth-sized planets call Milky Way home

The galaxy contains billions of potentially habitable Earth-sized planets, according to even the most conservative estimate drawing on data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
Although a mechanical failure recently put the telescope out of commission (SN: 6/15/13, p. 10), Kepler’s census of planets orbiting roughly 170,000 stars is enabling astronomers to predict how common planets similar to Earth are across the galaxy

Qingsogite

A newly christened mineral has an atomic structure that’s similar to diamond and nearly as hard. Qingsongite was first created in the laboratory in 1957, and geologists first found natural qingsongite, which is a cubic boron nitride, in chromium-rich rocks in Tibet in 2009.

The mineral is named after deceased Chinese geologist Qingsong Fang, who discovered diamond in similar Tibetan rocks in the late 1970s. Cubic boron nitride is the only boron mineral formed deep within the Earth. About 180 million years ago, the collision of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates brought qingsongite near the planet’s surface. An international team announced the discovery and new mineral name, now officially sanctioned by the International Mineralogical Association, in August.

What to do With Pizza Boxes

I am thinking about making the computer stand.

Instructions at http://www.buzzfeed.com/peggy/awesome-things-you-can-make-with-a-stupid-pizza-box

Brusspup

Brusspup is a guy who makes lots of awesome illusions like Richard Wiseman.

Funny/Scary things

These are pretty scary, and most of these happened to me.

Unbelievably Crazy

Old Soul

If you say yes to some of these, put it in the comments.

Get some sleep

What Would You Do

What would you do if you had a camera like this. If you have an answer put it in the comments.

Now I Understand

Street Fighter Photos

Old animals

Here are some reasons you''ll need a dog. And most of them are important.

Jimmy Kimmel

Hey you guys, I know it's been a long time and happy late Halloween. Also Jimmy Kimmel posted a new video called "YouTube Challenge - I Told My Kids I Ate All Their Halloween Candy 2013". My favorite one is the one when she said "that b**ch". If you have a favorite (or worst), put it in the comments.