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Science In Action: 16/04/2010

16/04/2010

BBC World Service - Science In Action, 16/04/2010

China earthquakes; NASA's Global Hawk; Venus Express; Sound tourism; Koalas in peril

China earthquakes; NASA's Global Hawk pilot-less plane; Volcanic activity on Venus; Sound tourism – visiting acoustic delights around the world; Threats to Koalas in Australia

CHINA EARTHQUAKES
A magnitude 6.9 earthquake hit Qinghai province in Western China.  The region is prone to earthquakes.  In 2008, a huge quake struck in neighbouring Sichuan province.  But did the first earthquake lead to or cause this second massive quake?  Tom Parsons, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey in California, published calculations in 2008 looking at the potential for another earthquake because of how the stresses underground had changed.  He hoped they could predict where the next big quake would occur, but did they?


NASA'S GLOBAL HAWK COMPLETES FIRST SCIENCE FLIGHT
NASA has successfully completed the first science flight of the Global Hawk unpiloted aircraft system over the Pacific Ocean.
The flight was the first of five scheduled for this month's Global Hawk Pacific, or GloPac, mission to study atmospheric science over the Pacific and Arctic oceans.


NASA FUNDING FOR MANNED SPACE MISSION TO MOON
Back in February President Barack Obama announced the cancellation of the NASA project designed to take humans back to the Moon.  There was huge uproar over the announcement to shelve the 'Constellation' programme, which was to develop new rockets to replace the Shuttle for servicing the International Space Station and hopefully to put astronauts on the lunar surface by 2020.  This week he's announced the project will still go ahead, but will be scaled down.


VOLCANOES ON VENUS
Venus is an extreme place - hot and dry with a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere. Because the surface is hidden by sulphuric acid clouds and the planet is similar to the Earth in size, there was early speculation that Venus might be a lush world full of life – of some sort.  Now, we believe that the Sun's heat boiled away early oceans on the planet, triggering a planet-warming runaway greenhouse effect that turned Venus into a Hellish place.  But there aren't enough impact craters on Venus to suggest that it's entirely geologically dead.  Something is smoothing out the surface.  Evidence from Europe's Venus Express probe suggests that our neighbour may still be volcanically active.


SOUND TOURISM
Browse through any travel guide and they're full of wonderful pictures and descriptions of places to go and see.  But what about places to go and hear?  Professor Trevor Cox, an acoustic engineer, from Salford University in the UK, thinks that we should be feasting our ears as much as our eyes on our travels around the world.  He's set up a website "Sound Tourism", where he's building a sonic wonder map of the world - and he's after our help to populate it with suggestions and recordings of the most amazing aural experiences.


KOALAS IN PERIL
2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity and we've been exploring the wealth of plants and animals on our planet as well as the threats and issues affecting them. Now we're turning to a very enigmatic animal from Australia - the koala - a marsupial - pouched mammal.  They spend their days chewing eucalyptus or gum trees and are an iconic Australian species.  But they are having a tough time in many areas.  Cars, dogs, and isolation because of urban development, all play their part in the animals' demise.  The ABC's reporter Kim Kleidon joined Deborah Tabart who heads up the Australian Koala Foundation at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary on the outskirts of Brisbane.

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