Gizmorama
January 12, 2011
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Also, you can find a follow-up on the Chinese stealth
fighter--mentioned a few issues ago--in the first article.
Until Next Time,
Erin
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Report: China tests stealth fighter
BEIJING - China conducted a test flight of its new stealth
fighter Tuesday while U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates
was visiting the country, a military observer said. Speaking
by telephone to The New York Times from Hong Kong, Andrei
Chang, considered to be an expert on the Chinese military,
said the J-20, which can evade radar detection, was in the
air for about 15 minutes during the test over an airfield
in southwestern Chengdu city. The test, coming before Gates'
scheduled meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao, was seen
as a show of Chinese force, the report said. The Times said
pictures of the flight were carried by unofficial Chinese
military Web sites and a computer bulletin board run by
China's state-run Global Times. There was no immediate
reaction from Pentagon officials traveling with Gates,
whose China visit is aimed at improving military relations
between the two countries. Chang said the stealth fighter's
flight test had originally been set for Thursday before a
large crowd of officials at Chengdu airfield but was post-
poned unexpectedly.
Global biofuel land area estimated
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - U.S. scientists say biofuel crops grown
on available land could meet half of the world's current
fuel consumption without affecting food crops or pastureland.
University of Illinois researchers, using detailed land anal-
ysis, identified land around the globe available to produce
grass crops for biofuels with minimal impact on agriculture
or the environment, a UI release said Monday. "The questions
we're trying to address are, what kind of land could be used
for biofuel crops?" environmental engineering Professor
Ximing Cai said. "If we have land, where is it and what is
the current land cover? The Illinois study focused on marg-
inal land for biofuel crops. Marginal land refers to land
with low inherent productivity, that has been abandoned or
degraded, or is of low quality for agricultural uses. In
their computer modeling, the researchers ruled out current
crop land, pasture land, and forests. They also assumed bio-
fuel crops would be watered by rainfall and not irrigation,
so no water would have to be diverted from agricultural land.
Researchers said an estimated land area of 2.7 million acres
was available globally, an area that would produce 26 to 56
percent of the world's current liquid fuel consumption.
Scientists probe puzzle of sun temperature
PALO ALTO, Calif. - A puzzle as to why the sun's outer atmos-
phere is millions of degrees hotter than its churning surface
may have been partly solved, U.S. researchers say. Scientists
at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in
Palo Alto, Calif., say fountain-like jets of hot gas that
shoot into the sun's outer atmosphere transport enough high-
temperature material from the sun's interior to keep the
outer layer, known as the corona, heated to several million
degrees Kelvin, ScienceNews.org reported Thursday. The newly
discovered jets are too narrow and short-lived to have been
detected with older instruments but were captured by cameras
and a high-resolution telescope aboard Japan's Hinode space-
craft, launched in 2006. Further observations with NASA's
recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory found that just
seconds after the appearance of the jets in the region just
above the visible surface, the corona briefly increased to
temperatures ranging from 100,000 to as high as 2 million
degrees Kelvin. The puzzle of the corona isn't entirely
solved yet, however, because no one knows what produces the
jets or how the gas they contain gets heated, researchers
say. "This is a great step forward," theorist Spiro Antiochos
of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.,
says, but "we still need a strong theoretical understanding
of the processes that are going on."
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