We now have the first scientifically accepted photos of triple and quadruple rainbows. For some, it’s as if we’ve captured a picture of a real unicorn.

Credit: Michael Theusner/Applied Optics.

Click here to expand this image

A scientific journal has accepted the first photos of a triple (tertiary) rainbow and a quadruple (quaternary) rainbow, both taken in summer 2011 in Germany. And it is likely we will see more photos of triple and quadruple rainbows in the years ahead.

Like many of you reading, I thought triple rainbows – three rainbows arcing through the sky at once – had been seen and photographed many times. An Internet search reveals photos claiming to be triple and even quadruple rainbows – but apparently these images either aren’t real or aren’t true rainbows. According to the Optical Society in Washington D.C. – a scientific society with 16,000 members around the world – there have been only five scientific reports of triple rainbows in 250 years. Some scientists believed triple and quadruple rainbows did not truly exist in nature, but now scientists have their proof.

A new meteorological model provided the scientific underpinnings to find these rare and precious triple and quadruple rainbows. The work is described in a series of papers in a special issue – Issue 28 – of the journal Applied Optics from the Optical Society, published September 30, 2011.

The beautiful image at the top of this post shows the third-order and fourth-order band of the quadruple rainbow. The first two bands of the rainbow are not shown in this image, which was taken by Michael Theusner on June 11, 2011 in Schiffdorf, Germany.

The image below is the first-ever picture of a triple rainbow.

Credit: Michael Grossmann/Applied Optics.

Michael Grossmann took this image on May 15, 2011 in Kampfelbach, Germany. (a) is his raw camera image. (b) shows the third-order rainbow arc, marked by arrows, after contrast expansion and unsharp masking. (The two reference positions A and B are for image orientation.)

We all know about rainbows to some extent, because everyone loves to see one. In our culture, we consider them a symbol of hope and good luck. When sunlight is refracted, or split, then reflected once in droplets of water, you see a single rainbow. When light is reflected twice inside water droplets, you see a double rainbow. Three reflections create a triple rainbow, and four a quadruple rainbow.

Double rainbow in Alaska. The shadow of the photographer’s head on the bottom marks the centre of the rainbow circle (antisolar point). Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

We’ve all seen single or even double rainbows. Why are triple and quadruple rainbows so rare? Sky watchers know that – to see a single or double rainbow – you have to look opposite the sun.

But – to see a triple or quadruple rainbow – you have to look toward the sun. Triple and quadruple rainbows form around the sun, centered on it. They are hard to see because, to see them, you have to look into the sun’s glare. That might explain why only five scientifically knowledgeable observers had described tertiary rainbows during the past 250 years, prior to Michael Grossmann’s first true photo.

Raymond Lee, a professor of meteorology at the U.S. Naval Academy, predicted a year ago how triple rainbows might be found and challenged rainbow chasers to find them. He told Foxnews.com that photographers should hold one hand out at arm’s length, with a thumb over the sun.

Then they should splay their fingers so that the distance between their pinky and thumb is at about a 17 degree angle. Where their pinky stops is where the third and fourth bands should be.

Lee figured this method out by reviewing descriptions of the scientific sightings of triple rainbows, then using a mathematical model – with colleague Philip Laven – to predict what conditions might produce visible triple rainbows. According to a press release by the Optical Society:

First, they needed dark thunderclouds and either a heavy downpour or a rainstorm with nearly uniformly sized droplets. Under these conditions, if the sun broke through the clouds, it could project a tertiary rainbow against the dark clouds nearby. The contrasting colors would make the dim tertiary visible.

When Lee presented his findings at last year’s International Conference on Atmospheric Optics, some scientists argued with him heatedly, saying that triple and quadruple rainbows were a myth, akin to the pot of gold at a raindow’s end.

But now we have the actual photos. According to the Optical Society, the photos underwent only minimal image processing to improve the contrast.

Michael Grossman recalled seeing a double rainbow on the day he snapped his photo of the triple rainbow. When the rain intensified, he said knew he had to turn toward the sun. He said:

It is really exaggerated to say that I saw it, but there seemed to be something.

The pictures he snapped in the rain showed he had captured the triple rainbow. Theusner’s photo – the second-ever of a triple rainbow and first of a quadruple rainbow – came about a month later. Now that the technique for seeing them has been proven, we can expect other sky photograpahers to take up the challenge – and more photos of triple and quadruple rainbows in the years ahead.

A double rainbow clearly showing the dark area between the two bands. This region is known as Alexander’s dark band. Image Credit: NASA

To learn more about how triple and quadruple rainbows form, and about the range of rainbows, mistbows, moonbows, halos and other delicate light phenomena of the open air, check out Les Cowley’s Atmospheric Optics , a wonderful website.

Bottom line: Michael Grossman and Michael Theusner have snapped the first-ever scientifically accepted photos of triple (tertiary) rainbows. Theusner also caught a quadruple (quaternary) rainbow on film. The now-historic photos inspired a special issue of the journal Applied Optics from the Optical Society, published September 30, 2011.

What makes a halo around the moon? Read more at earthsky.org

WASHINGTON — Fancy a holiday in a sea of junk? Environmentalists in the United States are offering “eco-adventurers” the chance to do just that.

From May 1 next year, the Sea Dragon will sail for two months through sections of the North Pacific Ocean swirling with debris from the March 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan, organizers said Wednesday.

“We’ll be riding the same currents that are transporting cigarette lighters, bottle caps, children’s toys and all manner of other plastic pollution generated by the tsunami,” said expedition leader Marcus Eriksen.

The unique voyage is organized by the 5 Gyres Institute and the Algalita Marine Research Institute, both California-based non-profit groups that research and raise public awareness of plastic marine pollution.

Nine places are available on the Sea Dragon, a 22-meter (72-foot) former long-distance racing yacht, with the voyage being made in two stages — the first costing $13,500 per person and the second priced at $15,500 per person.

Participants must agree to lend a hand to sail the steel-hulled sloop and to help researchers take stock of how the debris swept from the Japanese coast by the killer tsunami is drifting across the Pacific.

The first leg of the trip will depart the Marshall Islands for a section of the North Pacific Gyre known as the “western garbage patch” where little research has been carried out so far on plastic pollution.

Leg two will go due east from Japan to Hawaii through the gyre — a vortex of ocean currents where seaborne litter accumulates — to cross the so-called “Japan tsunami debris field.”

“Of great interest to the researchers is how fast the plastic trash is traveling across the gyre, how quickly or slowly it is decomposing, how rapidly marine life is colonizing on it, and whether it is transporting invasive species,” the organizers said.

Debris at sea fascinates oceanographers. In 1992 they seized upon the mid-Pacific loss of a container full of Asian-made rubber ducks, turtles, beavers and frogs as a unique chance to learn more about current flows.

Some of the bath toys washed up in Britain, most recently in 2009, apparently after being carried by the currents through the Arctic Ocean. Read more at www.google.com

New evidence supports the theory that comets delivered a significant portion of Earth’s oceans, which scientists believe formed about 8 million years after the planet itself.

The findings, which involve a University of Michigan astronomer, are published Oct. 5 online in Nature.

This is the comet Hartley, as imaged by NASA’s EPOXI spacecraft. Credit: Image courtesy of NASA

“Life would not exist on Earth without liquid water, and so the questions of how and when the oceans got here is a fundamental one,” said U-M astronomy professor Ted Bergin, “It’s a big puzzle and these new findings are an important piece.”

Bergin is a co-investigator on HiFi, the Heterodyne Instrument for the Infrared on the Hershel Space Observatory. With measurements from HiFi, the researchers found that the ice on a comet called Hartley 2 has the same chemical composition as our oceans. Both have similar D/H ratios. The D/H ratio is the proportion of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, in the water. A deuterium atom is a hydrogen with an extra neutron in its nucleus.

This was the first time ocean-like water was detected in a comet.

“We were all surprised,” Bergin said.

Six other comets HiFi measured in recent years had a much different D/H ratio than our oceans, meaning similar comets could not have been responsible for more than 10 percent of Earth’s water.

The astronomers hypothesize that Hartley 2 was born in a different part of the solar system than the other six. Hartley most likely formed in the Kuiper belt, which starts near Pluto at about 30 times farther from the sun than the Earth is. The other six hail from the Oort Cloud more than 5,000 times farther out.

The source of earth’s oceans has been a subject for debate among astronomers for decades. Until now, asteroids were thought to have provided most of the water. Now, however, Herschel has shown that at least one comet does have ocean-like water.

“The results show that the amount of material out there that could have contributed to Earth’s oceans is perhaps larger than we thought,” Bergin said. Read more at www.labspaces.net

A study into the muscle development of several different fish has given insights into the genetic leap that set the scene for the evolution of hind legs in terrestrial animals. This innovation gave rise to the tetrapods — four-legged creatures, and our distant ancestors — that made the first small steps on land some 400 million years ago.

Pectoral fin muscle formation in paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) utilises the fully derived mode of appendicular muscle formation and is not associated with an epithelial extension. (Credit: Cole et al., PLoS Biology, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001168)

A team of Australian scientists led by Professor Peter Currie, of the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University, and Dr Nicolas Cole, of the University of Sydney, report their results October 4 in online, open access journal PLoS Biology.

Scientists have long known that ancient lungfish species are the ancestors of the tetrapods. These fish could survive on land, breathing air and using their pelvic fins to propel themselves. Australia is home to three species of the few remaining lungfish — two marine species and one inhabiting Queensland’s Mary River basin.

There are big gaps in our knowledge, however. Most conclusions have previously been drawn from fossil skeletons, but the muscles critical to locomotion cannot be preserved in the fossil record. The team used fish living today to trace the evolution of pelvic fin muscles to find out how the load-bearing hind limbs of the tetrapods evolved. They compared embryos of the descendants of species representing key turning points in vertebrate evolution to see if there were differences in pelvic fin muscle formation. They studied “primitive” cartilaginous fish — Australia’s bamboo shark and its cousin, the elephant shark — as well as three bony fishes — the Australian lungfish, the zebrafish and the American paddlefish. The bony fish and in particular the lungfish are the closest living relative of the tetrapods’ most recent common ancestor with fish.

“We examined the way the different fish species generated the muscles of their pelvic fins, which are the evolutionary forerunners of the hind limbs,” said Professor Currie, a developmental biologist. Currie and his team genetically engineered the fish to trace the migration of precursor muscle cells in early developmental stages as the animal’s body took shape. These cells in the engineered fish were made to emit a red or green light, allowing the team to track the development of specific muscle groups. They found that the bony fish had a different mechanism of pelvic fin muscle formation from that of the cartilaginous fish, a mechanism that was a stepping stone to the evolution of tetrapod physiology.

“Humans are just modified fish,” said Professor Currie. “The genome of fish is not vastly different from our own. We have shown that the mechanism of pelvic muscle formation in bony fish is transitional between that in sharks and in our tetrapod ancestors.” Read more at www.sciencedaily.com

Scuba Diver Costume Your child will make a splash in this no-sew costume By Ellen Goldberg; photo by Squire Fox

Scouring pads, a soda bottle, and other household products give you a deep-sea diver’s duds.

Scuba gear: 3 yards black nylon webbing 1 yard self-adhesive Velcro 6 metallic scouring pads 2-liter plastic soda bottle 1 sports-bottle lid Silver spray paint 4 inches black rubber tubing 18 inches cord-keeper tube

Wet suit: Black hooded sweatshirt Black tights or leggings Black gloves Plastic safety goggles

1. Cut a piece of nylon webbing 2 inches longer than your child’s waist circumference. Attach Velcro pieces to each end for a belt. 2. Measure your child from front of waist, over shoulders, to back of waist. Cut two straps of webbing to this measurement. Glue one end of each piece of webbing to the center of the back of the belt, about 1/4 inch apart. Attach loose ends to front of belt, about 3 inches apart, like suspender straps. 3. Fold scouring pads into tubes and glue edges together. Glue tubes around belt to create diving weights. 4. Coat soda bottle and sports-bottle lid with spray paint and let dry, about one hour. 5. Glue a piece of webbing around bottom of soda bottle to resemble an air tank. Attach bottle to belt and straps with pieces of Velcro. 6. Wrap rubber tubing around the mouth of the soda bottle and glue ends inside cord-keeper tube. Push other end of cord keeper into loop of painted sports-bottle top for a ventilator; tuck cord-keeper tube under webbing strap to hold in place. Read more at www.parenting.com

When you’ve got a problem that ten years of trying has failed to solve, it’s time to consider another approach. So recently, when scientists at the University of Washington Department of Biochemistry, led by Dr. Firas Khatib (a featured Gnomedex speaker a few years back), failed to configure the structure of a retrovirus enzyme even after a decade of trying, they decided to enlist help from an unlikely source: gamers.

“We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed,” says Dr. Khatib.

Since 2008, the University of Washington’s Foldit project has been encouraging people to use their grey matter and play Foldit — a game that combines elements of puzzle solving, pattern recognition, crowdsourcing, and distributed computing — to fold proteins and determine their active, three-dimensional conclusions. Pattern matching is one of those rare computations in which the human brain excels over what is currently possible by purely computerized means, and Foldit aims to take full advantage of this human brainpower.

Says researcher Dr. Seth Cooper: “People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at. Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans. The results in this week’s paper show that gaming, science and computation can be combined to make advances that were not possible before.”

In only three weeks, this experiment paid off in ways where a decade of more traditional approaches had failed. Gamers were able to generate models that were close enough for the trained eyes of researchers to refine and discover the enzyme’s structure and discern vulnerabilities on the molecule that would make ideal targets for deactivation by drugs designed to knock it out. This could give us a vast new arsenal in the war against AIDS and other retroviral conditions.

The team’s findings are summed up in its paper, Crystal structure of a monomeric retroviral protease solved by protein folding game players, published in the September 18th edition of Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

If you’d like to give Foldit a spin for a more complete idea of how you can make a difference in big deal endeavors like curing cancer, abolishing Alzeheimer’s, drop kicking immune deficiencies, efficient biofuel production, and more (while having fun), check out Foldit. Read more at www.lockergnome.com

The crabs are large and dominant organisms, able to crush other animals

King crabs have been found on the edge of Antarctica, probably as a result of warming in the region, scientists say.

Writing in the journal Proceedings B, scientists report a large, reproductive population of crabs in the Palmer Deep, a basin cut in the continental shelf.

They suggest the crabs were washed in during an upsurge of warmer water.

The crabs are voracious crushers of sea floor animals and will probably change the ecosystem profoundly if and when they spread further, researchers warn.

Related species have been found around islands off the Antarctic Peninsula and on the outer edge of the continental shelf.

But here the crabs (Neolithodes yaldwyni) are living and reproducing in abundance right on the edge of the continent itself.

Search for life

The researchers sent the Genesis, a submersible remotely operated vehicle (ROV) from the University of Ghent in Belgium, into the Palmer Deep in March last year.

The idea was to look at what life was down there, rather than specifically to look for crabs; and the team was somewhat surprised by how many they found.

Judging by the density of the crabs and their tracks, the scientists estimate there may be 1.5 million crabs in the basin.

The crabs and their tracks were abundant

A female crab retrieved from the area was found to be carrying mature eggs and larvae.

“Our best guess is there was an event, or maybe more than one, where warmer water flushed up across the shelf and carried some of the larvae into the basin,” said project leader Craig Smith from the University of Hawaii.

It is believed that this species cannot tolerate water colder than 1.4C.

The seas here get warmer as you descend; and the crabs were only found below 850m.

The researchers calculate that they have probably been there only for 30-40 years; before that, the water would have been too cold even at the bottom of the Palmer Deep.

They cannot as yet survive on the continental shelf, which is at a depth of about 500m; but that could change.

“If you look at the rate at which the seas are warming, (the continental shelf) should be above 1.4C within a couple of decades, so the crabs are likely then to come into shallower waters,” Professor Smith told BBC News.

Predators

The upper limit of the crab-dwelling zone - 850m - also marks the line between abundant seabed life above and depleted life below.

“Above the crab zone, the abundance and diversity of plants and animals was high, with echinoderms including brittlestars, sea lilies and sea cucumbers,” said Professor Smith.

“We found none of them in the crab zone itself, and when we went 50-100m above we found very few - so we think the crabs are venturing up into shallow waters to feed.

“We would expect (local) extinctions in some of these organisms.”

These findings reinforce the belief of other scientists that king crabs will change the ecology of the Antarctic perimeter once they arrive - and that they would arrive at some point, washed from warmer waters along the South American coast, has long been expected.

With a legspan of up to a metre, the animals are generally top predators in the seafloor ecosystem.

The king (or stone) crabs are a group of about 120 species - and one member, the red king crab (Paralithodes camtschaticus) is already having an ecological impact in Norwegian waters following its slow spread from Russia.

However, in Northern latitudes they are also now important commercially, with Norwegian fishermen alone allocated a quota of thousands each year.

Fishing crabs for profit in this part of the Antarctic would not be permitted. But fishing could in time be used as a means to control them, said Professor Smith, if their ecological impacts become too severe. Read more at www.bbc.co.uk

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Radioactive cesium from the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant is circulating with the currents in the Pacific Ocean and will wash up on Japan’s shores again in between 20 and 30 years.

A TEPCO worker checks radiation levels around piping at the Fukushima nuclear power plant Photo: AFP/GETTY

Scientists from the government’s Meteorological Research Institute and the Central Research Institute of the Electric Power Industry announced their findings at a meeting of the Geochemical Society of Japan this week, adding that some of the cesium will also flow into the Indian Ocean and, eventually, reach the Atlantic.

The scientists estimated that some 3,500 terabecquerels of cesium-137 was released into the sea directly from the plant between March 11, when the earthquake and tsunami struck, and the end of May. Another 10,000 terabecquerels of cesium fell into the ocean after escaping from the reactors in the form of steam.

One terabecquerel is a trillion becquerels, the standard measure of radiation, and the Japanese government has set the permissible level of iodine-131 for vegetables and fish at 2,000 becquerels per kilogram (2.2lbs).

Cesium is considered a more serious threat, however, because of its relatively long half-life. Cesium has a half-life of around 30 years, can accumulate in muscles and is a known cause of cancer.

The researchers believe that the cesium has initially dispersed into the Pacific from the coast of Fukushima Prefecture but will be taken to the southwest by the prevailing currents at a depth of around 1,300 feet. Just short of the International Date Line, the shifting currents will take the cesium close to the Philippines before it again turns north on the Japan Current. Read more at www.telegraph.co.uk

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