History Preserved Cryogenically

Well, not exactly cryogenically, but frozen nonetheless:

Scientists trekking across a little visited part of Antarctica have discovered a bizarre relic of the Soviet Union is dominating the South Pole of Inaccessibility.

In the middle of no-where – literally the point on Antarctica furthest from the sea – an imposing bust of revolutionary Bolshevik Vladimir Lenin peers out onto the polar emptiness.

A Norwegian-US Scientific Traverse met Lenin this week while nearly a thousand kilometres to the south another group were “moving” the South Pole – literally.

A barber’s pole marks the actual spot but the US Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station sits on top of a moving ice-sheet – so the Pole moves.

The Inaccessibility Pole marks the point on Antarctica that is furthest from the ocean. At 3718 metres above sea-level it is in the Australian zone and seldom visited.

The Scientific Traverse this week made it to the Inaccessibility Pole for New Year’s Day and found a one time Soviet Union base buried under the ice.

The group’s website says Soviet scientists first visited the Pole in December 1958 and built a small cabin there.

After several weeks they left, putting the bust of Lenin on top of the chimney facing Moscow.

“Today the bust is clearly visible from many kilometres away, and remains as they left it on the chimney, although the cabin itself is buried under the snow,” the explorers say.

What does this tell us about Lenin and his progeny?  Is he down there waiting for a call? Or is he just lost, another pioneer who went off-course?

(HT to Jesse Walker.)

Tunguska “Trench” Found

The Tunguska asteroid of 1908, discussed here, is often referred to as an “event” of unspecified origin because no crater had been identified.   Now, it appears, one has been found. 

In their new study, a team of Italian scientists used acoustic imagery to investigate the bottom of Lake Cheko, about five miles (eight kilometers) north of the explosion’s suspected epicenter.

“When our expedition [was at] Tunguska, we didn’t have a clue that Lake Cheko might fill a crater,” said Luca Gasperini, a geologist with the Marine Science Institute in Bologna who led the study.

“We searched its bottom looking for extraterrestrial particles trapped in the mud. We mapped the basin and took samples. As we examined the data, we couldn’t believe what they were suggesting.

“The funnel-like shape of the basin and samples from its sedimentary deposits suggest that the lake fills an impact crater,” Gasperini said.

The crater is not round, but elongated, like a trench.  The mental picture I get is of a wheel-shaped chunk, spinning and rolling and then diving into the muddy ground.

If the chunk survived the explosion long enough to create a trench, wouldn’t that mean it’s still down there somewhere?  

“Science Suffers From an Excess of Significance”

Want to win a political argument? Want to get your spouse to change a health habit? Want to get your story on page one? Flash a scientific study. Except…

We all make mistakes and, if you believe medical scholar John Ioannidis, scientists make more than their fair share. By his calculations, most published research findings are wrong.

Dr. Ioannidis is an epidemiologist who studies research methods at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. In a series of influential analytical reports, he has documented how, in thousands of peer-reviewed research papers published every year, there may be so much less than meets the eye.

This column is by Wall Street Journal science writer Robert Lee Hotz.  The link is for WSJ subscribers.   Here’s a little more:

These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. “There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims,” Dr. Ioannidis said. “A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true.”

The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined.

A universal truth as applied to the discovery of information, one that applies to journalists, auditors, investigators.  If the spotlight is on, you want your performance to be memorable.

Take the discovery that the risk of disease may vary between men and women, depending on their genes. Studies have prominently reported such sex differences for hypertension, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis, as well as lung cancer and heart attacks. In research published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Ioannidis and his colleagues analyzed 432 published research claims concerning gender and genes.

Upon closer scrutiny, almost none of them held up. Only one was replicated.

Statistically speaking, science suffers from an excess of significance. Overeager researchers often tinker too much with the statistical variables of their analysis to coax any meaningful insight from their data sets. “People are messing around with the data to find anything that seems significant, to show they have found something that is new and unusual,” Dr. Ioannidis said.

Money is at the root of bad science…

What’s Going On With Black Holes?

Should I consider it ominous that, for the past week, my most popular post has been something I wrote 17 months ago about two black holes colliding in space?

Apparently, if this were to happen,

….space and time shift, density becomes infinite and time can come to a standstill.

Folks, it only feels like that sometimes.  But if you’re having black hole collision panic, let me know and we can discuss it.

“Palomar” to Premiere in Temecula

My friends Todd and Robin Mason have completed their epic scientific history documentary, “The Journey to Palomar,” and its first public screening will take place next week at the Temecula Valley International Film & Music Festival. It will be shown twice: September 13 at 8 p.m. and September 15 at 3:30 p.m.

The Palomar Observatory’s Hale Telescope, at one time the most powerful telescope on earth, was first used by Edwin Hubble and played a crucial role in gathering evidence to support Einstein’s theories and the idea of the Big Bang as the origin of the universe. Despite its age, it is far from outmoded and keeps a busy schedule to this day.

Palomar is also a San Diego County landmark, so this screening is being treated as news by the local media. From the North County Times:

The film follows the career of George Ellery Hale —- considered the “Father of Astrophysics” —- as he wages a lifelong struggle to build the giant telescope that would turn the way humanity views the heavens on its head.

The film also tells the story of the creation of “The Giant Eye” —- the telescope’s 200-inch-diameter mirror —- and how it captured the imagination of Depression-weary America.

Considered the “moon shot of the 1930s and ’40s,” the American public hung on every word printed and every radio broadcast about Hale’s project from the time the government grant was given to begin construction until the giant mirror arrived in Escondido in 1947 and began its journey up the mountain.

(snip)

The husband and wife team of Todd and Robin Mason have had a video production company in Los Angeles for more than two decades. In that time, they’ve found success —- “we’re making a living,” Todd Mason said with a laugh —- working on commercial and promotional pieces for companies such as Nissan and Bank of America.

“We decided a few years ago we wanted to do something that we wanted to do,” Todd Mason said. “I’ve always been interested in astronomy and a friend told us the story of how the Palomar Observatory came to be and it seemed really interesting.”

Lights Out for the River Dolphin

This was not unexpected, but still has huge significance:

The rare Chinese river dolphin has gone extinct, according to scientists who could not find a single one of the animals during a six-week search on China’s Yangtze River.

The small, nearly blind white dolphin, also known as the baiji, was nicknamed “the goddess of the Yangtze.”

“It’s possible that we missed one or two animals [during the search], but we can say the baiji is functionally extinct,” August Pfluger, a Swiss economist-turned-naturalist who financed the expedition, said in a telephone interview from Wuhan, China.

“If there are any baiji left in the river, they won’t have any chance of survival.”

If Pfluger’s team is correct, the baiji will be the first large aquatic mammal to have gone extinct since hunting and overfishing killed off the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s.

According to this story, the Yangtze was home to a number of unique species — many of them threatened with extinction, too:

This is no ordinary extinction of the kind that occurs frequently in a world of millions of still-evolving species. The Yangtze freshwater dolphin was a remarkable creature that separated from all other species so many millions of years ago, and had become so distinct, that it qualified as a mammal family in its own right. It is the first large vertebrate to have become extinct for 50 years and only the fourth entire mammal family to disappear since the time of Columbus, when Europeans began their colonisation of the world.

The three previous mammal families gone from the face of the Earth are the giant lemurs of Madagascar, which were eliminated in the 17th century, the island shrews of the West Indies, probably wiped out by the rats that accompanied Colombus on his voyage, and the Tasmanian tiger, the last known specimen of which died in captivity in 1936. (The most famous creature to have become extinct in the past 500 years, the Dodo, was a bird.)

Sam Turvey, conservation biologist at the Zoological Society of London, who led the expedition to find the Yangtze dolphin and is chief author of the paper, said: “The loss of such a unique and charismatic species is a shocking tragedy. This extinction represents the disappearance of a complete branch of the evolutionary tree of life and emphasises we have yet to take full responsibility in our role as guardians of the planet.”

Several other species are “just hanging on” in the Yangtze and could disappear within a few years unless action is taken now, Dr Turvey warned. They include the Chinese alligator, the finless porpoise and the Chinese paddlefish, which grows up to 7m long but has not been seen since 2003.

Reuters says “the last confirmed baiji sighting was 2002, although there have been a handful of unconfirmed sightings since then. The last baiji in captivity died in 2002.”

Maybe It’s Time for Some Good News

Like, how about a biodiesel motorcycle!?

Here’s a video link.

When I was a reporter, my AP Stylebook said Diesel should always be capitalized — because  Diesel was his name-o.  Shouldn’t we call it bioDiesel now?

Gossip Counts the Most*

In the previous post about Live Earth, I tried to weave in a mindblowing article from the Sunday NY Times Magazine, “The Gregarious Brain.” The article is about Williams Syndrome, a genetic developmental disorder. Among its symptoms is extreme friendliness and aggressive conversational gregariousness, which shows up at an early age.

But while the victims of this syndrome are charming in small doses, they often find themselves socially isolated because their lack of social fear leads to a lack of “social savvy.”

Most of us know when our conversation partners have had enough of us. Williams sufferers do not. In studying how the Williams syndrome brain differs from a normal human brain, some neurological scientists believe the development of social skills, in particular the ability to get information about our peers via conversation, was a key to both individual survival and, ultimately, our species’ dominance.

The people with Williams syndrome bring the nature of those social skills into sharper relief.  It’s a tightrope walk between getting what we need out of our association with a group, and managing our (rational) fears about the group members on whom we must depend.

To get across this tightrope, we depend on our ability to suss people out. Our brains are very attuned to getting information about the people in our group. We figure out who to trust by what others say about them. We’re not like Williams syndrome people, friendly to one and all. We are careful, even among people we’ve known and worked with for a long time.

We get the signals we need from gossip.  If we didn’t have access to gossip, our social fabric would fall apart.  An enormous percentage of our mental energies are devoted to gathering and processing gossip, and our brains have evolved accordingly.

We bring the same wary habits to our public acts, as voters and consumers. We are all part of a global “group” now, processing information not just about our local cohorts, but about our cultural, economic and political leaders from what we learn about them in the media.

When the media puts up artificial filters, they say they do it for our own good. But we don’t feel protected. We feel trapped, and we look for a way out. In totalitarian societies, people are willing to risk imprisonment or death to obtain gossip about their governments.  The controls over information in American society are looser, but they undeniably exist.  When the mainstream media sits on information because they don’t think it’s appropriate to answer its consumers’ questions, we now can turn to the internet, the id of mass communication, to get the gossip we need.

Consider the case of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

In the past week or so, we have learned first from blogs, then from the mainstream press, that his wife is divorcing him, because he has been unfaithful to her with a reporter who covers him for Telemundo. There are unconfirmed reports about other affairs; the reporter might or might not be his current girlfriend. All these shenanigans played out during the past year, a difficult year for Villaraigosa politically. His signature issue, school reform, crashed and burned in part because of the mayor’s mistaken judgments and temporary loss of political mastery.

To LA Times columnist Tim Rutten, all this is none of our business, so shame on us for our interest in Villaraigosa’s private life and shame on the bloggers who dug it out.

Hang onto something solid, Rutten bloviates up a stiff wind here:

When it comes to reporting on politics and elected officials, distinguishing between what is properly private and what is necessarily public becomes more difficult all the time.

It’s easy to blame the news media for this — for all the obvious reasons. They include an increasing number of editors willing to take their cue from journalism’s lowest common denominator, the gossip sheets, whether online or on slick paper, that continue to proliferate like informational vermin. By its very nature, gossip does not respect the distinction between public and private because it doesn’t acknowledge the existence of such a dichotomy. In fact, part of gossip’s guilty appeal comes from thumbing its nose at such niceties. The insatiable maw of the 24-hour news cycle also is a factor, as is the generalized collapse of confidence by newspapers engendered by print journalism’s passage through an economically wrenching transformation.

He goes on to point out that prior LA mayors had affairs that weren’t reported “because, even if City Hall reporters had been inclined to pursue the story, it would have been virtually impossible to make it conform to the standards their editors enforced.”

Were those editors — who also covered up the misdeeds of national politicians — more virtuous than today’s? Or were they depriving us of information we could’ve used and were entitled to?

Luckily, an even more senior LA Times‘ columnist gets it intuitively. George Skelton writes today:

Those who claim this is nobody’s business except for the people directly involved ignore the fact that many Angelenos voted for Villaraigosa believing he’d be an inspirational mayor and someone whom Latino kids could look up to as a role model. This infidelity is these voters’ business too. The first Latino mayor of modern L.A. has soiled his image and spoiled their dreams.

Some voters insist that they don’t care about a politician’s dalliances. Fine, they can click the remote or turn the page. Others do care. They’ll factor it into their attitudes about the man.

Outside the Los Angeles Basin, Villaraigosa has been little known. Now, he’s being introduced statewide as a serial philanderer who dumped on his wife years ago, sweet-talked her back into the house, used her as a political prop and returned to the pattern of womanizing. The family breakup is especially disturbing because the mayor and his wife have two teen children.

Later Skelton points out the crucial difference between Villaraigosa and other philandering politicians like Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger: Villaraigosa’s wife has demanded a divorce. Corrina is not “standing by her man.” That’s an important detail. Another crucial difference? Villaraigosa wants more from us. He wants to put the genie back in the bottle, become again “someone whom Latino kids could look up to as a role model,” and run for governor.

Rutten ultimately joins Skelton in condemning Villaraigosa, but for the most weightless of reasons: Because his lover is a journalist!

Villaraigosa’s personal connection with Salinas is a private issue that legitimately concerns only the two of them and their families. No one else has a moral or rhetorical right to an opinion on that aspect of their conduct. However, the fact that Salinas continued to report on the mayor while they were involved in this fashion is a public issue.

(snip)

Villaraigosa knows perfectly well that an intimate relationship with a reporter is bound to raise questions about whether he granted her special access. Worse, it also raises profound conflict-of-interest questions for Telemundo. Has the network’s reporting on his tenure been manicured by a reporter in love with her subject? Has that subject used his mutual affection with the reporter to manipulate coverage of his agenda?

Those aren’t particularly pleasant questions, but Salinas and Villaraigosa have behaved recklessly in an environment that, for better or worse, has become unforgiving.

Yeah, Rutten. That’s probably the first question Mrs. Villaraigosa asked. “Did you grant her…special access??” And then the flying plates.

Rutten is a smart man, but writing like this makes him seem almost as disconnected from reality as the Williams’ syndrome people. The ethics of journalism aren’t the only ethics that matter. In fact they won’t matter, if and when Antonio presents himself to the voters again. We’ll be talking about his affair and whether or not he has found the way back to being seen as trustworthy. We’ll be talking about whether he got his act together and saved his mayoralty. We’ll be talking about whether he’s a good person — or not.

We’ll look for clues to the real Antonio, and if we have to search for them on those dreaded “online media” sites — because the LA Times loves its “standards” more than its readers — that’s where we’ll go. It’ s not because we’ve succumbed to “informational vermin.” It’s because that’s how we’re wired as humans.

*Edited, 7/10/07

Tired Earth*

Not too long ago, having a celebrity at your environmental press conference was a sure way to attract the cameras and spread the word. Luckily, most of the celebs who agreed to appear were walk-the-walk types, like Ed Begley, Jr. You wouldn’t invite anyone who wasn’t serious about it. Begley would bicycle all the way from the Valley to Santa Monica to stand up for Heal the Bay or the Coalition for Clean Air. If someone had taken a satellite photo of his home, it would have embarassed neither him nor his cause. And he was never sanctimonious.

Now, the celeb phase of the environmental movement has achieved its absurd apotheosis and badly needs to be shut down. Billed as a massive teach-in on climate change, the Live Earth concerts were, politically, a train wreck. From Rasmussen Reports, a polling site:

The Live Earth concert promoted by former Vice President Al Gore received plenty of media coverage and hype, but most Americans tuned out. Just 22% said they followed news stories about the concert Somewhat or Very Closely. Seventy-five percent (75%) did not follow coverage of the event.

By way of comparison, eight-in-ten voters routinely said they were following news coverage of the recent Senate debate over immigration. Fifty-four percent (54%) said they followed news coverage of the President’s decision to commute Scooter Libby’s sentence.

Skepticism about the participants may have been a factor in creating this low level of interest. Most Americans (52%) believe the performers take part in such events because it is good for their image. Only 24% say the celebrities really believe in the cause while another 24% are not sure. One rock star who apparently shared that view is Matt Bellamy of the band Muse. Earlier in the week, he jokingly referred to Live Earth as “private jets for climate change.”

Only 34% believe that events like Live Earth actually help the cause they are intended to serve. Forty-one percent (41%) disagree. Those figures include 10% who believe the events are Very Helpful and 20% who say they are Not at All Helfpul. Adding to the skepticism, an earlier survey found that just 24% of Americans consider Al Gore an expert on Global Warming.

Given a choice of four major issues before the United States today, 36% named the war in Iraq as most important. Twenty-five percent (25%) named immigration, 20% selected the economy and only 12% thought Global Warming was the top issue.

Whatever needs to happen next to bring about a reversal of man-made global warming, that goal is now farther away, thanks to Al Gore, Madonna, Leo DiCaprio and the global concerteers, who only managed to persuade the public they received some personal benefit from their association with the issue. Neither the celebrities nor the event organizers never answered the question of their basic hypocrisy. In a TMZ/Defamer/Murdoch world, of course we’re all going to find out how much energy the movement’s stars use, how many times they fly in private jets, tour demands completely at odds with their stated positions, huge stock positions in companies that pollute the most, and the vast amounts of energy burned and pollution released by the concerts themselves.

Gore and the celebrities complain about the tabloidization of the news, and are especially bitter if the snark gets in the way of their unselfish efforts to, you know, change the world. But an intriguing NY Times Magazine piece about a neurological disorder called Williams Syndrome and its implications for understanding why the human brain evolved the way it did, contains a profound nugget of insight into why celebrities hurt the causes they seek to help, unless they’re willing to be more like Ed Begley, Jr., and less like the people we saw on those concert stages Saturday.

Bear with me, it will all make sense:

Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist and social-brain theorist, and others have documented correlations between brain size and social-group size in many primate species. The bigger an animal’s typical group size (20 or so for macaques, for instance, 50 or so for chimps), the larger the percentage of brain devoted to neocortex, the thin but critical outer layer that accounts for most of a primate’s cognitive abilities. In most mammals the neocortex accounts for 30 percent to 40 percent of brain volume. In the highly social primates it occupies about 50 percent to 65 percent. In humans, it’s 80 percent.

According to Dunbar, no such strong correlation exists between neocortex size and tasks like hunting, navigating or creating shelter. Understanding one another, it seems, is our greatest cognitive challenge. And the only way humans could handle groups of more than 50, Dunbar suggests, was to learn how to talk.

“The conventional view,” Dunbar notes in his book “Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language,” “is that language evolved to enable males to do things like coordinate hunts more effectively. . . . I am suggesting that language evolved to allow us to gossip.”

Dunbar’s assertion about the origin of language is controversial. But you needn’t agree with it to see that talk provides a far more powerful and efficient way to exchange social information than grooming does. In the social-brain theory’s broad definition, gossip means any conversation about social relationships: who did what to whom, who is what to whom, at every level, from family to work or school group to global politics. Defined this way, gossip accounts for about two-thirds of our conversation. All this yakking — murmured asides in the kitchen, gripefests in the office coffee room — yields vital data about changing alliances; shocking machinations; new, wished-for and missed opportunities; falling kings and rising stars; dangerous rivals and potential friends. These conversations tell us too what our gossipmates think about it all, and about us, all of which is crucial to maintaining our own alliances.

For we are all gossiped about, constantly evaluated by two criteria: Whether we can contribute, and whether we can be trusted. This reflects what Ralph Adolphs, a social neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, calls the “complex and dynamic interplay between two opposing factors: on the one hand, groups can provide better security from predators, better mate choice and more reliable food; on the other hand, mates and food are available also to competitors from within the group.” You’re part of a team, but you’re competing with team members. Your teammates hope you’ll contribute skills and intergroup competitive spirit — without, however, offering too much competition within the group, or at least not cheating when you do. So, even if they like you, they constantly assess your trustworthiness. They know you can’t afford not to compete, and they worry you might do it sneakily.

The sentence I emphasized suggests why a global TV event featuring movie stars and pop-music performers might be just about the worst way to convey environmental information — or in fact, any important political message. In the very same global village Live Earth sought to educate, we are consumed with gossip about the stars who pretend to teach us–the truth about how they live as opposed to what they want us to hear and believe.

Stars attract attention, but the audience’s relationship with them is complex. We’re suspicious of their motives, don’t completely buy their idealism, and are on the lookout for hypocrisy — which this group of stars gave us by the carload. The media doesn’t create this; it’s human nature.

That is why the “carbon offset” concept is not working and should be dumped forthwith. All it does is emphasize that rich entertainers can’t bear to sacrifice and will buy their way out of living their lives in anything remotely resembling the fashion the rest of us must do. It destroys any possibility of consensus on dealing with climate change.

Climate change is a scientific issue. It raises complex issues for governments. Individuals can’t do very much about it, but they are avidly interested in considering viable solutions offered by experts. Of course, we might want to know something about those experts to determine if they’re trustworthy, but we wouldn’t be bombarded on a daily basis with stories about their incredibly opulent lives. Instead, the focus would be where it belongs, on the points of debate leading toward a political solution that, one would hope, would make a difference in earth’s environment.

Ironically, in “the entertainment capitol of the world,” there was no Live Earth concert. Just Mayor Villaraigosa, Begley, produce Lawrence Bender and a few supporting-actor types from TV like Daphne Zuniga and Sharon Lawrence, turning on some lights that made City Hall look green. I was glad the mayor mentioned that “Los Angeles recycles more than any other metropolitan city.” Hurray for the Bureau of Sanitation!

*Edited, 7/9/07

We’ve Got Global Warming Right Where We Want It

First, former Vice President Al Gore goes to Congress, winning converts to the cause of reversing man-made global warming, and support for his proposal to cap U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide at current levels, and begin cutting them back by 90 percent over the next 43 years.  The political trend gets noticed:

As Gore concedes, he is more salesman than scientist. But most scientists acknowledge that he is absolutely right on the fundamentals: Humans are artificially warming the world, the risks of inaction are great, the time frame for action is growing short and meaningful cuts in emissions will happen only if the United States takes the lead. An increasing number of business leaders and politicians outside Washington are moving his way.

Congress is paying attention to this shift. Representative Henry Waxman of California has signed up 127 co-sponsors for a very tough bill he proposed last week that seeks to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by midcentury, which is close to what Gore wants. When you consider that Gore and President Bill Clinton could not find five senators willing to ratify the far more modest 1997 Kyoto treaty – which called for a mere 7 percent reduction below 1990 levels, with no further reductions scheduled after 2012 – you get some idea of how far the debate has come.

But then, project-by-project, in states across the country, viable ways to actually achieve these kinds of cuts get blocked.  From today’s LA Times:

In a blustery stretch of desert two hours east of Los Angeles, where many of the world’s first power-producing windmills were built, a plan for more turbines has triggered a backlash that echoes a national debate over the merits of wind energy.

A proposal to build about 50 windmills next to Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument has aroused passions in a region already dotted with 3,000 windmills, with opponents charging that the wind energy industry has neither delivered the promised power nor spared the environment.

The industry, which was born in California, now has projects in 40 states and $8 billion in investments over the last two years, according to the American Wind Energy Assn.

Supporters say wind power has come of age and will help slow global warming, while critics contend that it has delivered only a quarter of its promised energy, proved lethal to wildlife and, in the view of many residents, blighted the landscape.

Around the country, Internet blogs and anti-wind energy websites hum with angry postings about projects on picturesque ridgelines, seascapes and farmlands from New England to Texas.

Politicians and celebrities have weighed in. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and his Nantucket Island neighbors have so far successfully fought installation of offshore turbines.

Their opposition, in turn, has prompted criticism that rich liberals are all for alternative power providing it doesn’t mar their views.

So, are we serious about global warming or not?  Wind power is not perfect. But locations like San Gorgonio Pass, where the wind blows constantly, are inherently scarce.  We don’t have the luxury of ruling these sites off-limits, even when there is some other environmental impact.  Local politics should not drive how the pros and cons are weighed.

If we were serious about global warming, there would be a national policy to encourage development of wind projects in locations where there is the highest potential to exploit it for baseline power. Perhaps we should require environmental impact reports for each site — with the burden of proof being shifted to advocates of the no-build option.

I know that Gore and Waxman probably see the coming battles to be about conservation, green industries, solar power incentives, etc.   And certainly that’s going to be part of it.  But a properly located wind energy site is one of the few alternative-energy methods now available that is even close to being cost-competitive with burning fossil fuels.  Shouldn’t we be looking there first? 

Also, why isn’t there more discussion of hydro power?  According to this site, there are 80,000 dams in the U.S.  Only 2,400 of them generate electricity.  Wikipedia’s entry on hydroelectricity articulate the case against the energy source.  But what about installing turbines in existing dams?  If the dams are already built, what’s the incremental environmental damage from doing that?

Gore needs to shift his salesmanship toward selling solutions. Rep. Waxman is following the old Clean Air Act model of setting high standards and forcing local areas to meet them or else face lawsuits and federal sanctions.  That’s great if your purpose is to grandstand against enemies of the environment.  But I’d prefer we try to depoliticize this issue, acknowledge (which Gore does) that it won’t be easy, and stop creating binds for ourselves by simultaneously pursuing two competing environmental goals.  In San Gorgonio, in Cape Cod and elsewhere, we need to make tough choices.

If’ we’re really serious.  

It’s a Giant Squid…but it’s a Baby Giant Squid

I realize this has already been on Drudgereport, but since the giant squid from Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea appeared in so many of my childhood nightmares, I couldn’t help but share this with you — the first video ever taken of a giant squid.  (You have to click on the link, not the picture.) 

Disappointingly, this is actually a juvenile giant squid, only about 10-12 feet long.  They can grow to 60 feet long.  The preserved, frozen carcass of a 22-foot adult giant squid can be found at the Melbourne Aquarium.

Dinosaurs: Hard to Kill

It took a lot more than just one meteor slamming into Mexico to wipe out the big lizards, it turns out:

There’s growing evidence that the dinosaurs and most their contemporaries were not wiped out by the famed Chicxulub meteor impact, according to a paleontologist who says multiple meteor impacts, massive volcanism in India, and climate changes culminated in the end of the Cretaceous Period.

The Chicxulub impact may, in fact, have been the lesser and earlier of a series of meteors and volcanic eruptions that pounded life on Earth for more than 500,000 years, say Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller and her collaborators Thierry Adatte from the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, and Zsolt Berner and Doris Stueben from Karlsruhe University in Germany. A final, much larger and still unidentified impact 65.5 million years ago appears to have been the last straw, exterminating two thirds of all species in one of the largest mass extinction events in the history of life. It’s that impact — not Chicxulub — which left the famous extraterrestrial iridium layer found in rocks worldwide that marks the impact that finally ended the Age of Reptiles.

“The Chicxulub impact could not have caused the mass extinction,” says Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller, “because this impact predates the mass extinction and apparently didn’t cause any extinctions.”

The climate changes, caused in part by greenhouse gases released from “prolonged and massive eruptions” of the Deccan Flood Basalts in India, were pretty extreme: Oceans 3 or 4 degrees warmer, and land temperatures 7 or 8 degrees warmer, 20,000 years before, and 100,000 years after, the Chicxulub meteor struck. Marine life was affected by growing smaller and reproducing more offspring — to increase the odds for survival. Tropical species were on the edge of extinction. Then there was another huge meteor impact, comparable to the first. Where did that meteor strike? Scientists don’t know, although some are suggesting a 500-kilometer-wide crater in India might be a remnant of it.

Nothing Better than Griffith Observatory

Is there any public space in Los Angeles more wonderful than Griffith Observatory?

It is an architectural gem set against a cliff overlooking a vast expanse of Los Angeles. It is a celebration of a branch of science, astronomy, to which Southern California can stake a proud claim. In a few weeks, it will reopen after a five-year renovation project, but because our friends Todd & Robin Mason have gained the affection of both the scientific and science-history communities in this area, they were invited to a preview opening Sunday morning — and let my wife and me tag along.

The Masons are finalizing a documentary, “Journey to Palomar,” the story of George Ellery Hale’s creation of the Mt. Wilson and Palomar Telescopes that profoundly expanded humankind’s understanding of the universe, beginning with Edwin Hubble’s first observations of  the universe’s expansion, which led to the development of the Big Bang theory that is now almost universally accepted. The Mason’s documentary will be one of the films you can see at the Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon, a new theater that the “Star Trek” actor and his wife made possible.

As will the public after November 3, we met a shuttle bus on the Orange Street side of Hollywood and Highland and presented our tickets there. The Observatory will accept visitors via a registration system, but as before the renovation, admission will be free. Waiting for the bus gave us a minute to check out the old Grauman’s Chinese Theater:

We arrived to hear a talk from a volunteer who was clearly excited and proud of what had been done to bring the observatory back — and asked us not to take pictures of the few still-uncompleted details. Rather than going into the front door, which is what past visitors are familiar with, we were guided down a flight of stairs on the observatory’s west side, which leads to a new exhibit area — the Gunther Depths of Space, which covers a lot of information — our solar system and what we know about each of the planets; the stars, galaxies and nebulae; and “The Big Picture,” a 152 x 20 foot image of the “cosmic wilderness” — the Virgo cluster of stars and galaxies.

Here is what the Gunther room looks like:

And here is a detail from “The Big Picture,” which in its entirety shows you a million stars. Each lighted object on this image represents not a star, but an entire galaxy:

Upstairs, you’ll find some of the exhibits you recall, such as Foucault’s Pendulum, and the arresting murals in the rotunda, all nicely restored and probably augmented. But for me, when I got to this floor, I was less focused on the scientific information, and more on the sheer artistry of the building, indoors and out:

You probably remember this monument that depicts Gallileo and Copernicus and other early explorers of the heavens:

…and the walkways around the domes, up on the roof, opening up fantastic views of the city…

…as well as beautiful little architectural details like this:

I am really grateful we got to see this. It felt like a pilgrimage to the L.A. of old, the city and region with a spirit of adventure and discovery–a better place and a better time than L.A. now. But Griffith Observatory is here now, so the present-day is ennobled by it.

(Photo credits: From the top, #1 and #9 are by Todd Mason; #2-8 and #10 are by yours truly. And I hope the volunteers at Griffith Observatory will note that everything shown here is ready for public consumption!)

Tea and Sympathy and Science

Maybe the British are tired of everyone making fun of them for their seemingly fussy obsession with tea. University College London has conducted a study of tea-drinkers and has determined, scientifically, that “daily cups of tea can help you recover more quickly from the stresses of everyday life,” according to this item in Science Blog.

Professor Andrew Steptoe, UCL Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, says: “Drinking tea has traditionally been associated with stress relief, and many people believe that drinking tea helps them relax after facing the stresses of everyday life. However, scientific evidence for the relaxing properties of tea is quite limited. This is one of the first studies to assess tea in a double-blind placebo controlled design – that is, neither we nor the participants knew whether they were drinking real or fake tea. This means that any differences were due to the biological ingredients of tea, and not to the relaxing situations in which people might drink tea, whether they were familiar with the taste and liked it, and so on.

“We do not know what ingredients of tea were responsible for these effects on stress recovery and relaxation. Tea is chemically very complex, with many different ingredients. Ingredients such as catechins, polyphenols, flavonoids and amino acids have been found to have effects on neurotransmitters in the brain, but we cannot tell from this research which ones produced the differences.

“Nevertheless, our study suggests that drinking black tea may speed up our recovery from the daily stresses in life. Although it does not appear to reduce the actual levels of stress we experience, tea does seem to have a greater effect in bringing stress hormone levels back to normal. This has important health implications, because slow recovery following acute stress has been associated with a greater risk of chronic illnesses such as coronary heart disease.”

The two groups — one that had been given caffeinated tea, but in a fruit-flavored drink that deprived the drinker of all the tea-drinking atmospherics like decorative teacups, tea cozies, finger sandwiches and framed pictures of the Queen; and one that was given a caffeinated placebo with a similar flavor — were subjected to stressful experiences.

The real tea-drinkers had the same level of stress response as the placebo group, but “50 minutes after the task, cortisol levels had dropped by an average of 47 per cent in the tea drinking group compared with 27 per cent in the fake tea group.”

Expect the folks at Lipton, Bigelow and Celestial Seasonings to start marketing their products around these findings– teaming up with stress-management experts and putting them on media tours, sponsoring tea-tastings outside locations associated with stress, such as office buildings, DMV offices and Bar-exam test sites. The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, struggling to stay relevant in a Starbucks world, might start pushing the tea side of their business more.

Adagio Teas already sponsors “Tea Chat.” On the Black Tea forum, the University College findings are already causing quite a stir. This site also links to a “Tea Map,” described as “the online destination for finding tea rooms in and around your area.” For example, residents of the High Desert community of Lancaster can visit the Belladona Gift Boutique and Tea Room,

located in a renovated ‘1954 Storybook Home’ painted in true Victorian Flair with purple, yellow and teal. Your experience actually begins with the fragrance of roses along the walk-way while discovering the teapot shaped cut-outs in the concrete. Don’t miss the hardscape greeting around the bend – it is very colorful and full of sweet meaning.

First time visitors always catch their breath with surprise at the whimsical decor and enchanting aromas. The most delightful statement made was ‘Oh my Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore’.

Coffee-makers won’t take this lying down. I imagine they will soon commission a study showing the benefits of stress, and then dust off their old “Coffee Achievers” campaign.

Reverse-Engineering 9/11

It amazes me that 9/11 conspiracy theorists can get an audience.

If you think the towers fell as a result of a planned demolition, think about the number of people who would have to be involved to carry out such a scheme. Demolition experts to set up the bombs. Security personnel at the WTC to give them access. Ditto at the Pentagon. Nineteen suicidal Muslims who could fly planes, and who could each be given fake backgrounds implicating Al-Queda. People to teach them to fly. A group of people to coordinate all this activity. This conspiracy would be immediately exposed if either of the WTC planes were delayed by bad weather or maintenance problems — like that never happens. So there had to be people inside the airlines and air traffic control.

To pull off a stunt like this would require the work of dozens, if not hundreds, of trained and educated people. All of them would have to agree to take the secret to their graves. Not one of them could experience a change of heart later, or be tempted by the chance to become a celebrity by blowing the whistle, writing a book, going on Oprah. They would also all have to keep the secret from their families and friends — including their cover stories to explain what they were doing during the years of preparation a plot like this would require. All of them would have to be well-compensated to ensure this silence; a lot of money to obtain and distribute without the notice of any banking regulators or the IRS. You’d have to vigilantly ensure their continued silence. That means you’re paying a crack team of spies and assassins to monitor and control everything these people say and do — forever.

Forever — because who are the suspects in this alleged conspiracy? President Bush? He has an ambitious family that could not survive exposure of this plot. This dynasty does not intend for W to be the last Bush who serves as president. The oil companies? I assume these publicly-traded companies think they’ll be around for a long time in some form, and thus would remain liable for damages into the trillions if they were conclusively fingered. Any powerful person in business or politics would be extremely paranoid about one person leaking the plot — so paranoid that even if they had some yearning for 9/11 to happen to facilitate war or a U.S. takeover of the Middle East’s oil supply, they would probably shy away from the risks.

Anyway…these thoughts came to mind when I came across this study on Science Blog — a Purdue University-sponsored mathematical simulation of what happened when the jet hit the north tower. This quote is from Mete Sozen, the Kettelhut Distinguished Professor of Structural Engineering in Purdue’s School of Civil Engineering:

“Current findings from the simulation have identified the destruction of 11 columns on the 94th floor, 10 columns on the 95th floor and nine columns on the 96th floor,” he said. “This is a major insight. When you lose close to 25 percent of your columns at a given level, the building is significantly weakened and vulnerable to collapse.”

To depict the first half-second after the plane hit the building required 80 hours of a high-performance computer’s time. Many of the same researchers in 2002 conducted a study of the 9/11 Pentagon crash. If I’m reading the following correctly, the presence of 10,000 gallons of jet fuel and other liquids were responsible for much of the damage — even before the fuel caught fire:

“As a result of the Pentagon research, we have a better understanding of what happens when a tremendous mass of fluid such as fuel hits a solid object at high velocity,” Sozen said. “We believe most of the structural damage from such aircraft collisions is caused by the mass of the fluid on the craft, which includes the fuel.

“Damage resulting solely from the metal fuselage, engines and other aircraft parts is not as great as that resulting from the mass of fluids on board. You could think of the aircraft as a sausage skin. Its mass is tiny compared to the plane’s fluid contents.”

The simulation represents the plane and its mass as a mesh of hundreds of thousands of “finite elements,” or small squares containing specific physical characteristics. Like the previous Pentagon simulation, the software tool uses principles of physics to simulate how a plane’s huge mass of fuel and cargo impacts a building.

Do you believe the conspirators had the knowledge or ability to stage explosions that would precisely mimic these effects? That means there’s some fluid-mechanics genius with a high-performance computer out there going, “Mwah-hah-hah, they’ll never be able to tell the difference!”

I think most of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are actually hucksters. Generally, you have to pay for something — a book, a lecture, a downloadable video — in order to get them to tell you the real story.

Memo To My Teenage Son: Multitasking Isn’t Learning!

It’s actually pretty safe to say my son doesn’t read my blog.  Most of what I write about is incredibly boring, according to him:  Politics, PR, baseball, science…yawn!  So I might have to pay him to read this:

Multi-tasking affects the brain’s learning systems, and as a result, we do not learn as well when we are distracted, UCLA psychologists report this week in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Multi-tasking adversely affects how you learn,” said Russell Poldrack, UCLA associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study. “Even if you learn while multi-tasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily. Our study shows that to the degree you can learn while multi-tasking, you will use different brain systems.

“The best thing you can do to improve your memory is to pay attention to the things you want to remember,” Poldrack added. “Our data support that. When distractions force you to pay less attention to what you are doing, you don’t learn as well as if you had paid full attention.”

Shouldn’t that be obvious? 

I’ll tell you something else:  If you want to know why business and government are making so many bad decisions nowadays, you can blame the same thing — this absurd faith high-level people have in their own ability to multi-task.  Writing an e-mail, while having a meeting, while reading a report, while monitoring a conference call…this is how busy executives feel important.  They even multi-task while they’re on vacation!  Because, my God, if that phone ever stopped ringing, if those e-mails stopped flying over the transom, you might cease to exist!

But back to my son, who tries to tell me he’s doing work when, in fact, five Instant Message windows are open and actual dialogues are taking place; and he’s playing music; and talking on the phone.  Here is a snapshot of his brain:

Different forms of memory are processed by separate systems in the brain…. When you recall what you did last weekend or try to remember someone’s name or your driver’s license number, you are using a type of memory retrieval called declarative memory. (Patients with Alzheimer disease have damage in these brain areas.) When you remember how to ride a bicycle or how to play tennis, you are using what is called procedural memory; this requires a different set of brain areas than those used for learning facts and concepts, which rely on the declarative memory system. The beeps in the study disrupted declarative memory, said Poldrack, who also studies how the types of memory are related.

The brain’s hippocampus — a sea-horse-shaped structure that plays critical roles in processing, storing and recalling information — is necessary for declarative memory, Poldrack said. For the task learned without distraction, the hippocampus was involved. However, for the task learned with the distraction of the beeps, the hippocampus was not involved; but the striatum was, which is the brain system that underlies our ability to learn new skills.

The striatum is the brain system damaged in patients with Parkinson disease, Poldrack noted. Patients with Parkinson’s have trouble learning new motor skills but do not have trouble remembering the past.

“We have shown that multi-tasking makes it more likely you will rely on the striatum to learn,” Poldrack said. “Our study indicates that multi-tasking changes the way people learn.”

The researchers noted that they are not saying never to multi-task, just don’t multi-task while you are trying to learn something new that you hope to remember.  (emphasis mine)

Because, dude, this is so on the test!

The Snake and Us

Some 60 million years ago, snakes added venom to their arsenal of survival tools.  The first predators mammals faced were snakes.  And so, according to this story on Science Blog, some primates evolved better eyesight, larger brains and more dextrous hands and feet to avoid being poisoned and/or eaten.

According to Lynne Isbell, a UC Davis anthropology professor,

“There’s an evolutionary arms race between the predators and prey. Primates get better at spotting and avoiding snakes, so the snakes get better at concealment, or more venomous, and the primates respond…. A snake is the only predator you really need to see close up. If it’s a long way away it’s not dangerous.”

The eye that would prevent a sneak snake attack eventually became the eye that could distinguish other things in our world, and facilitate social interaction. Primates fortunate enough to live in a paradise where snakes lack venom tend not to have evolved as far, according to Isbell.

Try to stack this theory up with Genesis. Snakes tempted humankind to acquire knowledge, the Bible says. Indeed, they may have. Perhaps God’s wrath was unwarranted. Or perhaps Adam and Eve left of their own accord, trying to get away from that snake, whom they could now see with frightening clarity.

Isbell is writing a book about primate origins. Her article appeared in the Journal of Human Evolution’s July edition.

Not-So-Tiny Bubbles and Global Warming: News from UCSB

A team of UC Santa Barbara scientists went diving one day in 2002 in an area of the Santa Barbara Channel called Shane Seep, when the earth did something alarmingly rude, though not unexpected.

She belched — a “massive blowout of methane,” that “sounded like a freight train,” as Science Blog relates the story.

“Other people have reported this type of methane blowout, but no one has ever checked the numbers until now,” said Ira Leifer, lead author and an associate researcher with UCSB’s Marine Science Institute. “Ours is the first set of numbers associated with a seep blowout.” Leifer was in a research boat on the surface at the time of the blowouts.

Aside from underwater measurements, a nearby meteorological station measured the methane “cloud” that emerged as being approximately 5,000 cubic feet, or equal to the volume of the entire first floor of a two-bedroom house. The research team also had a small plane in place, flown by the California Department of Conservation, shooting video of the event from the air.

Leifer explained that when this type of blowout event occurs, virtually all the gas from the seeps escapes into the atmosphere, unlike the emission of small bubbles from the ocean floor, which partially, or mostly, dissolve in the ocean water. Transporting this methane to the atmosphere affects climate, according to the researchers. The methane blowout that the UCSB team witnessed reached the sea surface 60 feet above in just seven seconds. This was clear because the divers injected green food dye into the rising bubble plume.

Atmospheric methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and is the most abundant organic compound in the atmosphere. The ocean floor’s release of trapped methane hydrate — a form of ice that contains a large amount of methane within its crystal structure — in bubble form is both a symptom and a cause of global warming, according to UCSB geological science professor James Kennett’s theory.

When ocean temperatures rise, the methane releases are more likely to occur in the form of blowouts, like the one UCSB’s researchers saw. Those bubbles make a marked difference in the quantity of methane in the atmosphere, “thereby initiating a feedback cycle of abrupt atmospheric warming.”

Studies of seabed seep features suggest such events are common in the area of the Coal Oil Point seep field and very likely occur elsewhere.The authors explain that these results show that an important piece of the global climate puzzle may be explained by understanding bubble-plume processes during blowout events. The next important step is to measure the frequency and magnitude of these events. The UCSB seep group is working toward this goal through the development of a long-term, seep observatory in active seep areas.

(Not to make light of this disturbing news, but there is a bright side. Here’s one big blowout in Santa Barbara that can’t be blamed on Wendy McCaw.)

Bad News for Amateur Paleontologists and Utah Tourists

The Dinosaur Quarry Visitors Center at Dinosaur National Monument, an architectural landmark as well as destination for tourists and those who are fascinated by the fossil remains of our planet’s former ruling elite, abruptly closed yesterday when the building was condemned as unsafe.

This sad event was a long time coming. From the Deseret Morning News:

The center was built in the mid-1950s on unstable soil. The first hint of problems emerged before construction was complete, she wrote. “Cracks in the parking lot began to appear in November 1957, and during the first year of operation, staff detected disquieting vibrations in the upper gallery.”

In 1967, the support columns received reinforcement. But throughout the 1970s and ’80s, “the Quarry Visitor Center continued to move,” says the release. By 1989, this motion was compromising the structural integrity of the visitor gallery.

“Supplemental anchorages were used to anchor the existing steel roof and visitor gallery deck beams to the masonry pilasters along the south wall.”

This year the National Park Service commissioned a formal monitoring program, according to Risser. Detailed inspections identified conditions that had not been noticed before, she said.

“This was an extremely difficult decision to make, but based upon this new information, we decided that we couldn’t expose the visiting public or our employees to the risk posed by this building.”

The quarry visitors center allowed you to see some 1500 dinosaur bones still embedded in the cliff against which the building was constructed. It houses the world’s largest quarry of Jurassic Period dinosaur bones, the result of paleontologist Earl Douglass’ smart hunch that a river flowed into this area 150 million ago, and that it carried the remains of dinosaurs that lived and died by its banks. Beginning his dig in 1909, Douglass shipped his initial discoveries to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, where he was employed. There the bones were reassembled into dinosaur skeletons and put on display.

About 300,000 people visited the visitors’ center each year, and undoubtedly it was on the itinerary for tens of thousands of people this summer for whom this will come as a rude surprise. If you know anyone planning to visit Utah — pass the word. National Park officials hope to raise the money to repair the building, but no plans are yet in place.

Solar Power Meets Nanotechnology at Caltech

Cal-Tech and BP Solar will collaborate on a project to deploy nanotechnology to provide cheaper and more efficient solar energy. From a joint press release:

For an initial five-year period, researchers at Caltech and BP will explore a method of growing silicon by creating arrays of nanorods rather than by casting ingots and cutting wafers, which is the current conventional way of producing silicon for solar cells. Nanorods are small cylinders of silicon that can be 100 times smaller than a human hair and would be tightly packed in an array like bristles in a brush.

A solar cell made up of an array of nanorods will be able to efficiently absorb light along the length of the rods while also collecting the electricity generated by sunlight more efficiently than a conventional solar cell.

The Caltech solar nanorod program will be directed by Nate Lewis, the George L. Argyros Professor and professor of chemistry, and Harry Atwater, the Howard Hughes Professor and professor of applied physics and materials science. In addition, eight postdoctoral researchers and graduate students will work on the project.

“Nanotechnology can offer new and unique ways to make solar-cell materials that are cheaper yet could perform nearly as well as conventional materials,” says Lewis, an expert in surface chemistry and photochemistry.

Lewis’s group will investigate uses of nanotechnology to create designer solar-cell materials, from nanorods to nanowires, in order to change the conventional paradigm for solar-cell materials.

“Using nanorods as the active elements opens up very new approaches to design and low-cost fabrication of high-performance solar cells,” adds Atwater, an expert in electronic and optoelectronic materials and devices.

I’ve been joking with friends lately that the solutions to global warming are going to come from nanotechnology. But it looks like I might’ve been right!

Just on an intuitive level, look at it this way. All energy systems operate inefficiently to some degree. Some of that inefficiency translates into pollution. Inefficiency also stands in the way of conservation.

Nanotechnology, in particular molecular manufacturing, has the potential to produce products at a minuscule fraction of the energy required to make those products today. (Look at this video for a sense of what the molecular manufacturing gurus think is coming in the next 20 years or so.) Or, assuming we continue to rely on fossil fuels, nanotechnology could be used to filter out greenhouse gases at power plants, trapping them for disposal. It can also be used to greatly reduce the inefficiency of transferring energy from its natural source into its end use — by changing, say, the molecular structure of what we use to transmit energy.

Some potential exists, perhaps, for nanotechnology to be applied directly to reducing the existing, dangerously high levels of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere. Many scientists believe we are already “past the point of no return” to avoid the dramatic effects of global warming — that in fact we are already seeing them.

If so, it won’t be enough to cut future emissions, even at dramatic levels, although it is no less vital that we do so. The logical consequences of such a view is that we need to focus more attention on getting carbon dioxide that is in the air now, stripped out of the air. Nanotechnology would surely play a role in this admittedly outlandish idea, because of the large amounts of energy required. But wouldn’t it be just too elegant if the Caltech/BP research project resulted in an applicable solar solution to the energy needs of an air-stripping project?

I don’t want to sound like P.T. Barnum or Jimmy Swaggert about all this. Nanotechnology sounds many alarm bells, even among its advocates. For all its potential to shift our economy away from its reliance on high-energy manufacturing, this magic genie poses a host of other environmental, economic and global security threats. But it often surprises me how low on the news media’s radar screen the march of nanotechnology appears.

For example, the story at the start of this post about Caltech, a major local university, and BP, the successor-by-acquisition to LA’s own Arco? Big news here, here, here, and here. But in Caltech’s hometown media? This story in the LA Times, buried on the bottom of page 2 of the Business section. Nothing in the Daily News. Nothing in the Pasadena Star News.  Nothing in the San Diego Union Tribune, in the city where the announcement was made.  From what I can tell, both Caltech and BP Solar put out a news release on this yesterday, and paid PR Newswire to distribute it. The editors saw it and said “ehh.”

But there was lots and lots of room for this. Nothing like Hooters, puppies and an outbreak of prudish hypocrisy to distract our media from what we used to call news. Maybe Caltech should talk to Hooters about setting up a foundation for global warming research.

(I’ll run a pilot program right here. I’ll tag this post “Hooters” (along with the more appropriate tags) and see how many extra hits I get.)

Ball of Fire*

A big meteorite hit Norway last week — with a force equivalent to the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. From Aftenposten:

At around 2:05 a.m. on Wednesday, residents of the northern part of Troms and the western areas of Finnmark could clearly see a ball of fire taking several seconds to travel across the sky.

A few minutes later an impact could be heard and geophysics and seismology research foundation NORSAR registered a powerful sound and seismic disturbances at 02:13.25 a.m. at their station in Karasjok.

Farmer Peter Bruvold was out on his farm in Lyngseidet with a camera because his mare Virika was about to foal for the first time.

"I saw a brilliant flash of light in the sky, and this became a light with a tail of smoke," Bruvold told Aftenposten.no. He photographed the object and then continued to tend to his animals when he heard an enormous crash.

"I heard the bang seven minutes later. It sounded like when you set off a solid charge of dynamite a kilometer (0.62 miles) away," Bruvold said.

Very little news about this, even on the long-tailed Internet. Sure, Troms is a remote area, north of the Arctic Circle. But: It's one planet. While a meteorite landing two-thirds of a mile from a farmer in the frozen north might seem like a faraway event, something like this could happen, and a global catastrophe would be the result.

If an asteroid crashes into the Earth, it is likely to splash down somewhere in the oceans that cover 70 percent of the planet's surface. Huge tsunami waves, spreading out from the impact site like the ripples from a rock tossed into a pond, would inundate heavily populated coastal areas. A computer simulation of an asteroid impact tsunami developed by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows waves as high as 400 feet sweeping onto the Atlantic Coast of the United States.

The researchers based their simulation on a real asteroid known to be on course for a close encounter with Earth eight centuries from now. Steven Ward, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UCSC, and Erik Asphaug, an associate professor of Earth sciences, report their findings in the June issue of the Geophysical Journal International.

March 16, 2880, is the day the asteroid known as 1950 DA, a huge rock two-thirds of a mile in diameter, is due to swing so close to Earth it could slam into the Atlantic Ocean at 38,000 miles per hour. The probability of a direct hit is pretty small, but over the long timescales of Earth's history, asteroids this size and larger have periodically hammered the planet, sometimes with calamitous effects. The so-called K/T impact, for example, ended the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

"From a geologic perspective, events like this have happened many times in the past. Asteroids the size of 1950 DA have probably struck the Earth about 600 times since the age of the dinosaurs," Ward said.

Here's a link to the simulation. Have a nice day!

*UPDATE 6-12-06: The "Hiroshima" comparison was made by an astronomer at the University of Oslo, Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard. However, another Norwegian scientist disputes him:

Truls Lynne Hansen of the Northern Lights Observatory (Nordlysobservatoriet) in Tromsø disputes Røed Ødegaard's description, calling it an exaggeration.

"Our atmosphere is peppered with small stones from outer space all the time," Hansen told newspaper Aftenposten. "Most burn up and disappear, but some land here."

He thinks that what hit northern Norway last week was a stone weighing around 12 kilos (about 26 pounds). "Out in space it generated enormous speed, but after entering our atmosphere its tempo eased," Hansen said. "This kind of meteorite isn't radioactive and it's not glowing when it hits the ground."

 

In the same article, Aftenposten runs a somewhat inscrutable photo of the supposed impact site:

Surf’s Up

If you ponder the mysteries of the universe, check out morning’s LA Times story about LIGO – the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory Caltech operates in Hanford, Washington and an identical twin managed by MIT in Livingston, Louisiana — which scientists hope will allow them to demonstrate the truth of Einstein’s theory that “large bodies moving through space would give off waves of gravity, traveling at light speed, that would shrink and expand space-time itself.”

After Einstein, our conception of the universe changed. It is not empty space, it is a fabric. Space, and everything occupied by space, can be bent and stretched by waves of gravity, which Times’ author John Johnson Jr. likens to the ripples from a spoon stirring milk, or the indentation a bowling ball would make on a trampoline.

Today, such waves exist only in theory, the product of cosmic events like supernovas or pairs of neutron stars whipping through each others’ orbit and then smashing into each other.

According to theory, if our planet came close to the source of a gravitational wave, Earth would stretch to twice its normal size, then shrink in half before returning to its original shape — a scenario worthy of a Road Runner cartoon. Have no fear, however. The waves that could reach Earth are very weak, too weak to be measured — until last November when LIGO “reached a level of sensitivity at which (Caltech physicist Kip S. Thorne) and other experts believe they might detect waves.”

Here’s how Johnson describes what’s involved for LIGO to measure gravitational waves:

Down a twisting side road, LIGO appears out of the Russian cheatgrass and mustard plants, a bulky apparition with two tubes extending at right angles into the desert.

The 2.4-mile-long tentacles are the heart of LIGO. They are at right angles so that incoming gravity waves will shrink one arm while lengthening the other. An identical facility sits in a forest in southern Louisiana, so that the readings made at one observatory can be cross-checked almost 2,000 miles away.

(snip)

Inside the arms is a laser interferometer, which works by splitting a laser beam and sending one of the two resulting beams down each arm. The beams then bounce around 100 times on a set of mirrors before being sent back to a photodetector.

The two beams should recombine at exactly the same time since they travel an identical distance.

But if a gravity wave passes by, the beams will be thrown off as the arms are alternately stretched and squeezed.

Detecting such a minute signal has required extraordinary steps.
Because the site had to be as flat as possible, satellites were used to survey the land, which was eventually graded to within three-eighths of an inch over five miles.

To get around the problem of air molecules shaking the mirrors, workers sucked the air out of the tubes down to a billionth of an atmosphere. But that still wasn’t good enough to make sure the speed of light would be constant throughout the tubes. So the team had to get the tubes down to a trillionth of an atmosphere.

The surface of the four 10-inch mirrors in the arms is so smooth it doesn’t vary by more than 30-billionths of an inch. Thirty control systems keep the lasers and mirrors in alignment. The vibration isolation system is so sophisticated, the only thing approaching it is the mechanics used by semiconductor chip makers to etch circuits on the chips.

Read the whole thing.