No More Posts Here

Starting now, I'm just going to post exclusively to my original blog, Loose on the Internet.  That way I can post something everyday, rather than posting sporadically over three separate blogs.  Over the next few weeks, I may post some of the old posts from here to there, if they're good, I want them to be there.  So, content's not ending, it's just moving.  There will still be plenty of science there.

Climate Change Ruining Cork

Bad news for all you wine enthusiasts out there.  The cork oak, the tree that wine cork is made from, is in decline, has been for 20 years, and it looks like climate change is to blame.  The problem is that the bark on these trees is thinning, and trees with thinner bark have fewer of the proteins which are necessary for good wine cork.  Corks made from bad cork oak has more lenticular channels, letting more air into the wine, and when the oxygen meets the alcohol in the bottle, it reacts, forming acetic acid and making the wine taste like vinegar, and nobody wants that.

As for climate change being the problem, scientists believe that increased temperatures and higher levels of UV radiation is causing the bark to thin.  The bad cork trees have more chemicals that help absorb ultraviolet light than good cork trees, suggesting the trees are adapting to deal with higher levels of radiation.  So, you may have to settle for a metal stopper for your wine rather than having to fiddle with a cork and a corkscrew.  Then you get bits of cork in the wine, and then you drink the wine, but you're not a wine expert so you have no idea why this wine is supposed to be so good.  You only bought the wine because you wanted to feel fancy.  Sorry, not the biggest wine fan.

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Beer and Space...Again

I've already written about the planetary beer series before, but that's just the tip of the space beer iceberg, it seems.  I suppose it's only natural that we want to send our beer to the limit, after all, beer is as old as civilization itself, it's been our faithful companion for thousands of years.  Sometimes, you just like to have a nice beer.  So, here's an entire article about space beer.

The article is most about the Ninkasi Brewing Company, in Oregon, and their efforts to launch some yeast into space and brew beer with it.  While the yeast was lost in the desert, they sounded like they were going to try again, and I admire their persistence.  We also got some history on space beer, and how there's a mini-brewery on the International Space Station right now.  Sapporo Beer has already made beer descended from barley grown in space, and Dogfish Head actually made a beer brewed with moon rocks in it, which is just about the best use for those that I can imagine.  If I had known about that, it would have been really cool to go there and try some.  That would probably be the only reason I would willingly want to visit Delaware.  Sure, there's lots of practical applications to researching space beer, but let's be honest.  I would pay good money to drink a beer brewed in space, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

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Earthquake Map Shows Risk Zones

Yes, another post about earthquakes.  It was just a few days ago, but you gotta go where the science takes you.  This map, made by the USGS, shows how likely an earthquake is in the next 50 years for the entire nation.  No surprises that the Pacific Coast is very much at risk, and I'm also not surprised by the fairly significant danger zone centered on the southeast corner of Missouri.  It's not typical earthquake country, but it has happened, and the USGS is predicting it could very easily happen in the next 50 years.

What surprised me the most about that map was that the coast of South Carolina was at the same risk level as the Pacific Coast and the central Mississippi River.  I had no idea they were worried about earthquakes there, but a brief internet search has given the answer.  The New Madrid earthquake in 1811 was the worst earthquake outside of a fault zone at an 8 on the Mercalli scale.  There was an earthquake that measured at around a 7 in Charleston in 1886, which I had never heard of.  It's suspected that the faults are old leftovers from the breakup of Pangaea.  Other surprising high areas of risk were the mountains of Tennessee and upstate New York.  The earthquakes out here on the East Coast are of course not going to be as severe since there is no active fault line, but the buildings are not earthquake-resistant like they are in the West, so a smaller quake can do just as much, if not even more damage.

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Martian Gullies Not Carved by Water

Bad news for the search for liquid water on Mars.  The gullies that up to now were believed to have formed through the flow of liquid water were actually created by dry ice.  These gullies tend to grow and be active during the winter, and winter on Mars is far too cold for liquid water to be doing anything remotely close to the surface.

We thought these gullies were formed by liquid water because that's how they're formed on Earth, and it only made sense that a geologic feature on Mars that looks exactly like a geologic feature on Earth would be made through the same process.  Dry ice can create the same sort of gullies, and it is far more likely that the gullies form through dry ice activity.  Sublimation loosens the ground, triggering avalanches, while also reducing the friction between particles, causing them to flow more easily.

There is still hope for liquid water on Mars today.  There is another kind of feature called recurring slope lineae, dark streaks running down slopes.  These form over the summer, making it more likely they are created through the activity of liquid water.

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To Find Life, We're Going To Need a Big Telescope

We've discovered over a thousand extrasolar planets, with thousands more waiting to be confirmed.  The problem is that we don't know anything about these planets.  Sure, we know their size, their approximate mass, and how close they orbit their star, but that can only tell us so much.  We need a more powerful and more dedicated space-based telescope in order to perform a comprehensive search of an exoplanet, which is the only way we'll be able to tell if there's life on it, or even if it's capable of supporting life.  Again, we've found plenty of planets in the habitable zone of their stars, but we can't tell anything about them.  This sounds like a job for the James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch in 2018, and whose mission statement includes searching for exoplanets.  Sounds great, right?  We'll be finding life any time.

Turns out it probably won't be that easy.  The JWST will be the biggest telescope ever put in space with a diameter of 6.5 meters.  That's pretty big, but it's only big enough to survey in detail only the nearest exoplanets.  We may get lucky and find something nearby, but odds are, we won't.  To improve our odds, we need a telescope that's 10, maybe even 20 meters across, and the technology to get a telescope that big into space doesn't exist yet.  It may take decades for us to launch a big enough telescope into orbit to find life out there in the galaxy, but every step we take is getting us closer to that ultimate goal.

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Calm Down, the Polar Vortex Isn't Coming Back

Don't worry, things won't be this bad.

It was very cold this winter throughout much of the United States.  Here in Pennsylvania, temperatures often never got above freezing, which is a good ten to fifteen degrees below average.  There were quite a few days where it didn't go past the low teens.  It was not fun.  Now, cooler temperatures are in the forecast this upcoming week, all because of a mass of cool polar air.  Good news for us all.
Headlines are declaring this the return of the polar vortex, but it isn't

This whole chain of events started half a world away, with Typhoon Neoguri.  It set off the jet stream, which caused it to dip far to the south, down into the Midwest.  Normally, the jet stream stays in the polar region over the summer, which is why this sort of thing doesn't happen over the summer.  This phenomenon is known as a high meridional event, and while it is similar to a polar vortex, it isn't the same.  Most importantly, it's July.  20 degrees below average translates to a nice day.  In the winter, 20 degrees below average was brutal cold.  This event will also not last as long, temperatures should be back to normal by the end of the week.  What we do have to worry is the extreme temperature differences creating severe storms, which the West actually needs pretty bad.  They're in a terrible drought right now, and this could do them some good.  So, far from being the end of the world, this blast of cool air could help us out.

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