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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New Earthquake Hotspot: Oklahoma?

This is causing earthquakes. Fantastic.

California is well-known for having lots of earthquakes.  With the San Andreas fault running through the middle of the state, it's to be expected.  In the past couple of years, Oklahoma has experienced hundreds of earthquakes greater than a magnitude of 3.  This is a drastic departure from the thirty year stretch from 1978 to 2008, where the average number of earthquakes was two a year.  Now, it isn't unheard of for earthquakes to strike this section of the country, some of the largest earthquakes ever occurred in New Madrid, Missouri back in 1811.  The earthquakes aren't big, with the biggest so far being a 5.6, but Oklahoma shouldn't be getting this many earthquakes at all.

There is a reason for the increased seismic activity, and that reason is us.  Of course, it all starts with the oil industry.  The wastewater from the extraction process is being injected deep into the ground, which disrupts old, existing faults.  This is known as injection-induced seismicity, and it is a well-documented phenomenon, being known for over 50 years.  While it isn't known for certain why Oklahoma is so vulnerable to this phenomenon when fluid injection is common all across the country, scientists believe that the problem could easily get worse, and potentially threaten major cities.  Sounds like the sort of dire consequence that should dissuade further oil-based endeavors, creating damaging earthquakes.  I'm sure absolutely nothing will change.

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Birds May Not Be Dinosaur Descendents

Everybody knows that the closest living descendents of the dinosaurs are birds.  Their evolutionary paths separated in the Jurassic Era, with the birds surviving the K-T extinction, and the dinosaurs dying out.  I know that's what I thought when I wrote about dinosaurs before.  This is all documented paleontological history, birds definitely came from dinosaurs.

Meet Scansoriopterix.  It was found in Inner Mongolia (which is in China, not Mongolia), and it was initially classified as a dinosaur.  But after the fossil underwent a thorough examination, it was found that Scansoriopterix lacks the spinal structure that all other dinosaurs have.  Instead, it is now believed that this animal is descended from creatures that predate the dinosaurs, and thus Scansoriopterix bears no particular relation to the dinosaurs.  This means that anything descended from Scansoriopterix would also not be descended from the dinosaurs.  So, birds aren't dinosaurs after all.  When you eat chicken for supper tomorrow, you're not eating a latter-day dinosaur. 

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Tidal Friction Could Help Earth-Sized Planets in Eccentric Orbits

Solar system creation is a chaotic and violent event.  Giant planets often barrel through the inner part of a young solar system, which disrupts smaller planets which form closer to the star.  A planet that was in the habitable zone and could have had a good chance to develop life may find itself flung out of the solar system, or at the very least forced into an eccentric orbit, approaching its star very closely or getting much further away that it was previously.  This raises the possibility of our terrestrial planet running into some other planet, or getting absorbed by the star itself.  If the planet does survive, it still has to worry about the intense gravitational forces placed upon it when the planet does get close to the star.

There is good news though, according to a recent study.  If a planet has multiple layers like ours does, it will settle back into a circular orbit much quicker than expected, in less than a million years.  As long as the planet is not melted completely through, it will resist tidal flexing and quite quickly resume a safe, circular orbit.  After a while, the tidal heating would subside, the planet would cool off and potentially become habitable.  Also, the study also found that a planet covered in a thick layer of ice could also benefit from tidal heating, as a layer of ice hundreds or thousands of miles thick is actually rather springy and would flex in exactly the right way to generate a lot of heat, melting much of the ice and creating subsurface oceans, much like on Europa.

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Changes In Earth's Magnetic Field

Scientists have suspected for a while that the Earth's magnetic poles were in the middle of shifting, and recent evidence from the Swarm satellite array gives a big boost to that theory.  The magnetic field over the Western Hemisphere has weakened quite considerably in the past six months, while the field has strengthened over the Indian Ocean.  This new data is significant, because it shows that the magnetic field is shifting much quicker than previously believed.  The magnetic field appears to be weakened about five percent a decade, which indicates that a complete magnetic shift is likely in the next couple hundred years.

While a weakening magnetic field will almost certainly have no effect on life itself, our electrical systems could be at risk.  It would probably be good to take some sort of precaution to protect our power infrastructure before the magnetic field flips completely.  That way it prevents any potential disaster down the line.  Will we do that?  Probably not. 

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Ancient Bird Discovered: It Was Really Big

This is a big truck.

Pelagornis sandersi was a sea bird that lived about 25 million years ago.  It was a member of the pelagornithid, a extinct family of birds that are known for having pseudo-teeth.  Rather than being independent pieces of enamel like ours, their "teeth" were projections from their jaw.  This particular pelagornithid was on the large side.  How big?  Try twice as big as the biggest bird alive, the royal albatross.  Pelagornis sandersi had a wingspan of 20 to 24 feet long.  A Ford F-250, the longest production car vehicle ever made, is 22 feet long.  Imagine a bird that big.

Now, imagine this bird, but truck sized. And yes, it could fly.

The big question about a bird so big is whether or not it could fly.  Based on the models, Pelagornis sandersi was not only capable of flight, but probably spent very long periods of time in the air, gliding along in search of prey.  These birds likely covered thousands of miles in the air every year, returning to land only occasionally to make a nest.

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Planetary Beer Series

Do you like astronomy and beer?  Well, so do I.  It's a market that is begging to be opened up, and now, it has been.  Bell's Brewery, which is in one of the best named towns in the world (Kalamazoo), is starting a line of beers inspired by Gustov Holst's famous musical suite, "The Planets", which is of course based on...the planets.  Each beer represents the character given to it in Holst's suite, for example, Mars is a strong double IPA to put one in the mood for war.  We didn't know much about Neptune in the 19th century, it was a bit of a mystery, and so to represent this, Neptune's beer is a mystical stout, whatever that means.  I want to try it just to find out.  And a quick glance at the Wikipedia page says that you can get Bell's Brewery beers here in Pennsylvania.  I'll have to keep a lookout for it.

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Fate of Cassini Decided

Cassini is eventually going to run out of power, since it has no solar panels and the nuclear reactor on board only has so much fuel.  Now, NASA could leave it floating around Saturn forever, but they won't.  Much like the Galileo probe, Cassini is going to take a dive into Saturn's atmosphere, sending back valuable data and spectacular images until the very end.

Why do this to a space probe that's done so much?  After all, we didn't send the Voyager probes into any planets.  In both Galileo and Cassini's cases, NASA wants to protect potential biospheres from any interference from Earth.  Both Titan and Enceladus could host life, and we don't want to introduce any foreign objects into a pristine ecosystem until we're sure we won't do it any harm.  Now, Cassini still has two and a half years before this happens, so there's still plenty of time left in its mission.  But after Cassini goes, there won't be much human presence in the outer solar system.  There are plans for probes to go to all of the moons that potentially host life out there, but for now, that's all they are, and it'll be a while before they get off the ground, if at all.  So, enjoy Cassini while it's still there.

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Questioning Everything About Quantum Mechanics

Quantum mechanics has always been kind of a weird concept.  The whole idea of reality coming down to a series of probabilities is not easy to wrap your head around.  However, in the early 20th century, there were two interpretations of quantum mechanics.  The first is what we know today, the probabilistic version most advocated by Niels Bohr, and the pilot-wave theory, proposed by Louis de but there has been a challenge to the standard model of quantum mechanics from the field of fluid dynamics.
Broglie.  People didn't really like Bohr's version, most notably Albert Einstein, which should have boded well for de Broglie's theory, since it was deterministic at its heart.  But for whatever reason, Bohr's theory caught on, and it didn't take long for pilot-wave theory to become a complete joke in the scientific community.  That's how it's remained for the past 80 years,

What is pilot-wave theory anyway?  It comes, obviously, from pilot waves, which form when ripples
in a liquid interact with each other.  De Broglie's theory said that particles work in the same way, as the effects of particles on each other cause the quantum effects we see in the double-slit experiment, for example.  According to probabilistic quantum theory, that effect is caused by the inherent unpredictability of the particles, but according to pilot-wave theory, the particles do have a definite path, we just can't determine it exactly.  The important part is that, theoretically anyway, if we knew the exact position of all particles in the universe at one time, we could determine their future paths with certainty.

So, where does fluid dynamics enter into this?  An experiment was recently done where a drop of silicon oil was placed in a liquid and the entire thing was vibrated.  At a certain frequency the drop bounced along the surface in the same way de Broglie proposed in the pilot-wave theory.  This was a curiosity that could not be ignored.  So, the scientists recreated the double-slit experiment in fluids, and found that the pilot waves would travel through both slits, while other droplets would pick one or the other.  They duplicated the results of the double-slit experiment within classical physics, which is, according to the standard model of quantum mechanics, impossible.  In many other tests, the liquids also duplicated the behavior of pilot-wave quantum theory, and the results are undeniably very interesting.

There's always a but with science, and of course, there's one here.  Right now, all we have is some interesting results from one experiment, and at this point, pilot-wave theory cannot explain many things that regular quantum mechanics can.  Given adequate research time, answers may be found, but there is the second and even bigger problem.  Physicists, on the whole, don't seem willing to give this theory a fair chance.  Pilot-wave theory never had a good reputation, and in our current system, reputation matters.  Who's going to give a grant to research a theory that nobody takes seriously?  Universities don't like to see their money disappear without positive results, and there's a very good chance pilot-wave theory comes up empty.  It's the nature of the field.  Results are nice, but you learn just as much from every negative answer, and who knows, maybe one of those crazy ideas you're sure can't be right actually wasn't so crazy after all.  You never know unless you test it.

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Giant Ocean Vortices Found

On the surface, it looks like the ocean doesn't do a whole lot by itself.  Sure, there are waves, but those are caused by the wind.  Other than the massive ocean currents that fuel our climates, it doesn't seem like the ocean does very much.  But that is not the case.  By very patiently and accurately bouncing radar waves off the surface of the water, scientists were able to construct a very accurate elevation map of the ocean, finding there were often small depressions, the signature of an ocean eddy.  To find their volume, a whole fleet of small, automatic submersibles were used.  Seriously, there's 3,000 of the things all over the world, and we never hear about them.  Thanks news.

Anyway, these mesoscale eddies, as scientists are calling them (since they're medium in size), are about 60 miles across and about 3,000 feet in depth, and move very slowly, only about three miles a day.  These eddies are important because they're moving vast quantities of water, and therefore transporting lots of whatever is floating in the water.  They could also have a major effect on Earth's climate, and if they do, it's important to learn as much as we can about them. 

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Learning New Things About Science

It's always nice to learn something new about science.  For instance, up to this point, I thought that there were only four states of matter: solids, liquids, gases, and plasma.  However, I just learned today there's a fifth state of matter, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.  This isn't new, but it's so fundamental that I'm surprised this wasn't a bigger story.  I guess that since a lot of the time you only hear about three states of matter, the fact there's five is not a big deal.  We at least encounter plasma occasionally in our daily lives, but we'll probably never encounter a Bose-Einstein condensate.  Still, I think it's important to know as much as you can, even if all that knowledge isn't imminently practical.  So, read all about Bose-Einstein condensates, and expand your mind.

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Diamond Star Found

You may have heard of the exoplanet 55 Cancri e.  Not a catchy name, but you probably know it as the diamond planet.  Now, it looks like there's a diamond star to go with it.  We would have never found it were it not for its companion, PSR-J2222-0137, which is a pulsar.  Pulsars are very precise things, and while observing this one, astronomers noticed significant warping was delaying the pulses.  Because of the exact nature of the pulses, scientists were able to determine the exact mass of the objects.  The pulsar was 1.2 solar masses, while the companion is 1.05 solar masses. 

An object of that mass is probably a white dwarf, so we looked for one.  But we couldn't find one.  The resolution would have shown a star 10 times fainter than any previously known white dwarf, but there was nothing there.  There is an object there, but we can't see it.  It's been theorized that white dwarfs will slowly cool off into what is known as a black dwarf, but we've never seen one, because they're black (obviously) and they don't have the extreme gravitational pull a black hole does.  We only found this one because it's in orbit around a pulsar.  The star is still pretty hot at nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, but the carbon has crystallized, which is why we'll inevitably call this a diamond star.

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Physics Now Says The Universe Shouldn't Exist

Discovering the Higgs Boson was a big deal for physics.  However, there may be a problem.  Based on the properties of the boson, current models show that the universe should have collapsed a few seconds after the Big Bang.  The problem is that the universe, in its early expansion phase, should have experienced extreme jittering at the quantum level.  These fluctuations would have disrupted the Higgs field, and brought the infant universe crashing back down on itself.

Obviously, the universe does exist.  We would be having some difficulty right now if it wasn't.  So, there must be something that we're missing that explains why the universe is still here.  The leading idea is supersymmetry, but the entire field is still highly speculative, and there isn't a lot of good observational data yet.  If the Higgs Boson was just a bit heavier, there wouldn't be a problem, but it's just light enough that it can be easily disturbed.  So, hopefully we can figure out what's going on before the universe realizes that it shouldn't exist right now.

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Noctilucent Cloud Season is Here

Noctilucent Clouds from the International Space Station

Good news for people who love their unusual atmospheric phenomenon!  There's a strange type of cloud that you can only see during the summer in the higher latitudes.  All of the clouds that we usually see form in the troposphere, which is the lowest and thickest part of the atmosphere.  Noctilucent clouds can only be found in the mesosphere, 50 miles above the Earth's surface.  Their existence is still a bit of a mystery, as clouds need both water vapor and an aerosol, like dust, to form, and it's basically impossible for airborne dust to get that high into the atmosphere.  Scientists think that the aerosol is debris from space.  The Earth gets bombarded with a lot of space junk every day, and quite a bit of it gets stuck in the upper atmosphere.  The water vapor is no mystery, upwellings of moist air are strong enough during the summer months for the water to get into the upper atmosphere, which is why you can only see these clouds during the summer.

Now, historically, southern Pennsylvania is too far south to see these clouds, as they stayed in polar and subpolar latitudes.  But global warming has brought them farther south.  In an interesting twist, global warming, while warming the lower atmosphere, actually makes the upper atmosphere colder, widening the range for noctilucent clouds to form.  Noctilucent clouds have been spotted as far south as Virginia and Colorado.  So, it may be unlikely, but it is possible.  Of course, your best odds to see these clouds are to go north.  I would love to see them, they look really cool.

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Very Tiny Gravitational Constant Measured

A rubidium fountain, though this is a clock, not an experiment.

Wait a minute, says everyone who's taken a physics class.  Don't we already know what the
gravitational constant is?  Isn't it part of Newton's equations? Yes, the gravitational constant has been measured many times, although not actually by Newton himself.  It was first calculated in 1798, and has been adjusted quite a bit over the years to considerable accuracy.  Or so we thought.  As it turns out, all those values for the gravitational constant in the equation
F_g = G * m₁m₂ / r² were wrong.  The problem is that the gravitational force is so tiny that virtually anything could cause errors.  So the value of the gravitational constant is not nearly as well known as other constants such as the speed of light.


In an experiment involving a rubidium atomic fountain and several hundred kilograms of tungsten, scientists have found an error-free value for the gravitational constant.  The value they got is 6.67191 × 10^-11 m³ kg^-1 s^-2, while the previously accepted value was 6.67384 × 10^-11 m³ kg^-1 s^-2.  That doesn't sound like very much, I know I only used 6.67 in my physics classes, and I'm sure that's all anybody would use just using that equation casually.  But for physicists, that is a big difference.  This new value isn't as precise as old values, but it is more accurate, and it raises hopes that a both precise and accurate value for the gravitational constant will soon be agreed upon.

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Spiders Don't Just Eat Insects

In fact, there's a whole bunch of spiders that are actually quite good at catching fish.  Many of these spiders are in the Dolomedes genus, or as they're more commonly known, fishing spiders.  Yes, the fishing spiders do actually catch fish.  This may not come as a surprise, but what was a surprise is just how widespread the habit of spiders catching things that aren't insects.  There are spiders catching fish on every continent except Antarctica.

The particular spider that you see to the right is the six-spotted fishing spider, which is native to the United States.  I'm pretty sure I've seen this kind of spider before, although there are a couple of others that also inhabit the northeast portion of the country.  They are pretty big, other than some wolf spiders and the big orb weavers, you won't find a bigger spider in this section of the country.  No tarantulas around here.  Of course, everybody hates spiders, so once they saw the picture up there, they probably ran away and don't care about the particular range of the six-spotted fishing spider.  Which is too bad.

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Why Evolution Took a Billion Year Break

About 2 billion years ago, life mastered photosynthesis.  This was an incredibly important evolutionary step, as air filled with oxygen is of course a prerequisite for life as we know it.  However, after photosynthesis had been mastered, evolution took a break.  A long break.  More than a billion year break, as it wasn't until about 750 million years ago that things began evolving again.  Scientists think that they may have a reason for this pause, the entire planet, geologically speaking, was also on break.

Plate subduction could only occur once the mantle had cooled.

We've known for a while that Earth's active plate tectonics was an important factor in the development of life, but for a long time, the Earth's plates weren't doing very much.  The continents grew quickly early in the Earth's life, but about 2 billion years ago, the process stopped, because the mantle was still too hot for plate tectonics as we know it to commence.  Plates couldn't slide into the mantle at subduction zones.  So for a billion years the plates sat around, waiting for the mantle to cool off.  This finally happened about 750 million years ago, when the Earth once again became geologically active.  The supercontinents that had dominated the Earth for a billion years broke apart, and new ecosystems were created, allowing for the evolution of life once again.

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Bigger Roads Don't Help Traffic

It seems like it would make perfect sense.  If a road has a traffic problem, adding more lanes should make things better.  More lanes means more cars can go through, and the traffic problem should be solved.  But because of the economic principle of induced demand, it doesn't actually work like that.  By increasing the supply of something, in this case roads, it actually encourages more people to want to use the road.  So, while expanding two lane road to four lanes should double the amount of space for the current traffic, it doesn't do as much good as it should when twice as many people decide to use the expanded road.

Adding more lanes wouldn't help traffic here.

This effect also works in reverse, as taking roads away in a city has the effect of reducing traffic, not making it worse.  Of course, taking an enormous road away will cause problems, and a big new road in the middle of nowhere will not fill up with traffic immediately.  I don't know if I agree with the solution to this problem, but I wouldn't want to drive in a big city anyway, congestion charge or not.

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Earth's Oldest Rocks Contain An Important Ingredient For Life

All life today uses DNA to encode genetic information.  However, there are quite a few viruses out there that use RNA, and scientists believe that the very first lifeforms also used RNA, because it is simpler than DNA.  However, there was a problem with this theory, as one of the key components of RNA is ribose, which does not last very long without some sort of stabilizer.  The best ribose stabilizer is boron, but it appeared that early Earth didn't have any.  Mars does, so all the theories on RNA life were based on Martian meteorites making their way to Earth, and while this is possible, it's hardly likely.

A detailed analysis of some of the oldest rocks on Earth now shows that boron was present on the ancient Earth without any assistance from Mars.  The rocks, found in Isua, Greenland, are about 3.8 billion years old, which is about as old as we'll ever find.  There is actually quite a bit of boron in some of the rocks, and if boron was present, that means the ribose necessary for RNA would have been chemically stable for long periods of time, long enough for the first rudimentary forms of life to begin making crude copies of RNA.

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Lots of Water Below Earth's Crust

Scientists have suspected for quite a while that there was water in the Earth's mantle, trapped inside certain minerals, but there are obvious difficulties in proving that theory.  We've put men on the moon, but the farthest down we've ever drilled is about 40,000 feet, and that took nearly 20 years.  We know very little about the interior of our planet because it is so difficult to obtain any sort of direct observation.

It looks like scientists have found their subsurface water.  There may be entire oceans worth of water bound up inside a mineral known as ringwoodite in the form of hydroxide ions.  I'm not much of a geologist, so I would highly recommend reading the article because I'm not sure I would summarize correctly, but it is nice to know that Earth has plenty of water still in reserve.  We can't get to it, but it's there.

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Did Dinosaurs Have Warm or Cold Blood?

It's a question that has been asked for many years with no conclusive answer.  Dinosaurs were reptiles, which have cold blood, but the closest descendents of the dinosaurs today are birds, which are warm blooded.  Scientists now believe they have answered the question, and the answer is...neither.  It was a trick question after all, as it appears dinosaurs were actually something in between warm and cold blooded.  

Cold blooded animals, or ectotherms, depend on their environment to heat up their bodies.  It's the reason you won't find many reptiles in polar climates, they can't get enough energy in the cold to do anything.  Warm blooded animals, or endotherms, control their own temperatures through adjusting their metabolism.  These are what most people know, but there are a couple other means of temperature regulation out there.  There are gigantotherms, animals which maintain body heat through sheer mass.  Crocodiles are an example of this, and since dinosaurs could grow quite large, it would make sense for them to be gigantotherms too.  Right?

Dinosaurs were actually mesotherms, which are animals that generate some body heat, but do not maintain a constant temperature.  Again, mesotherms tend to be big, although not always.  The echidna, which is a small, egg-laying mammal, is a mesotherm, as are great white sharks and tuna.  The advantage for dinosaurs being mesotherms is that it allowed to move, grow, and reproduce faster than normal reptiles could, while their lower metabolism allowed them to get by on less food.  A modern-day mammalian predator could not find enough food to survive if it were the size of a T-rex.  There were a lot of dinosaurs, some may have been ectotherms or endotherms, and the winged dinosaurs present further mysteries, but in general, they were mesotherms.

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Ancestor of Nearly All Vertebrates Found

Artist's rendition of Metaspriggina.

Nearly all vertebrates today have jaws, we have them, birds have them, reptiles have them, they're a very common feature.  There are a few vertebrates out there that don't have jaws, animals like the lamprey and hagfish.  These are very old creatures, as the original vertebrates didn't have jaws.  Now, scientists believe they have found a species that shows evidence of jaw formation.

The species in question is Metaspriggina, a tiny little fish whose fossil is more than 500 million years old, back during the Cambrian Era, which is when complex life began to appear.  This discovery changes the way scientists look at the evolution of vertebrate animals.  Previously, it was thought that the ancestor of jawed vertebrates was similar to a lamprey because there was a lack of evidence for a ancient ancestral fish that spawned both jawed and jawless vertebrates.  With this discovery, it seems that jawless vertebrates, instead of being the original, are instead a newer offshoot of Metaspriggina. 

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Solar Change and Planetary Habitibility

Watery worlds like this may not last long.

Earth has been habitable for a very long time, virtually its entire 4.5 billion year life.  Water has existed on the surface for nearly all of that time, and so has life.  That life was only single-celled for most of that time, but there was life nonetheless.  The Earth is a fantastic place for life, and will be for billions of years to come, right?  Well, not quite.  The sun is slowly but surely getting brighter, and in a billion or so years from now, it will eventually render Earth inhospitable to life.

The slow evolution of the sun presents a problem for planetary habitability everywhere.  Stars everywhere exhibit this same behavior, it's the natural life cycle of a star.  The Sun, for example, was about 30% less bright when it first formed as compared to today.  The Earth of 4 billion years ago was in the habitable zone at that time, and liquid water formed on the surface.  According to the models, considering how the Sun has brightened, the Earth should be about 100°C warmer today than it was when it formed.  But it isn't, if anything, it's cooler now than before.  So, what's going on?

The answer, it seems, is that the slow evolution of our planet and the life on it has fortuitously balanced out the heating effects of an expanding Sun, moderating the temperature and keeping the planet cool.  This is not good for the search for complex and intelligent life in the universe.  While it is likely that life evolved on many planets, most of those planets will not have experienced the same good fortune the Earth has had.  Cancelling out solar heating through "geobiological" cooling is not a guarantee, and so there will be many worlds out there that have heated up beyond where life can restore planetary balance.

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Cosmos Episode 13 Thoughts

Well, that's it for Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.  This last episode was very contemplative, as it should have been.  As is tradition in Cosmos, we started off in one of the most interesting and far-thinking places of the ancient world: the Library of Alexandria.  Sure, the ancients were far from perfect, and the knowledge collected there was only for a select few.  But for several hundred years, the Library was dedicated to the collection of all the knowledge in the ancient world, and the city of Alexandria became a metropolis of not just Egypt, but the entire world.  People there were citizens of a broader universe then the relatively small Nile delta the city sits on.  Athens and Rome may have been great cities, the centers of glorious civilizations, but there would not be another city like Alexandria for a very, very long time.

A good portion of the episode was spent on dark matter.  The idea of dark matter was first brought up by crazy old Fritz Zwicky back in the 1930's, but with no good evidence to back up his claim, that idea was forgotten.  At the time, the idea of dark matter was silly.  40 years later, scientists began looking at the rotation of galaxies, watching the stars orbit around, anticipating that stars in the outer portion of the galaxy would move much slower than stars in a closer orbit, just like the planets in the outer solar system move slower than the ones in the inner solar system.  This went against everything we knew about gravity.  There were two option, either Einstein and Newton were completely wrong, or there was something there that we couldn't see exerting a whole lot of gravity on these galaxies.  That something is dark matter.  It took a long time for Zwicky's idea to be proven correct, and it very easily could have been wrong.  Scientists of the 1930's were perfectly capable, but their equipment was just not up to the task, and nobody bothered to look.  As it turns out, all the visible matter in the universe, every last bit of it, is only about 5% of the total mass of the universe.  A third of it is dark matter, and the rest is the even more mysterious dark energy, which is pushing the universe apart at an accelerating rate.

You could argue about what mankind's greatest achievement has been, but the Voyager space probes are definitely near the top of that list.  For the first time, we built something that is going beyond the solar system, beyond any influence of Earth, into the great unknown.  Maybe one day somebody will  read the messages they bear, or maybe one day our own descendents will stumble across them after all knowledge of them has been lost to time.  But they're out there, and of course, they are responsible for one of the greatest images ever taken: the Pale Blue Dot.  We got quite a bit of Carl Sagan as we heard his thoughts on this absolutely incredible image, and that picture is every bit as evocative now as it was then.  Our planet, as big as it seems to us, is reduced to a single, slightly blue pixel in a vast, empty space.  Everything we know and have ever known is on that pixel.  Frankly, I can't imagine someone going, "Well, I know enough right now."  The thought of a infinite universe that I can never fully understand is more comforting to me.  I would go so far as to say that I hope I never do learn everything there is to know about the universe, because what would I do with infinite knowledge?  It would be boring.

The series closes with a meditation on science itself.  We hear about the importance of a free society where ideas can be discussed without fear of censure or retribution.  We learn about the importance of challenging authority, that nobody can tell you that something is true without first giving you actual proof.  The importance of experimentation, and the thing that I found most important, that everyone, even the greatest scientists, can be wrong.  Nobody is right about everything, because we are all only human.  Science is a tool, but we can misuse it, and it is our duty to make sure science does not get misused.  I think that was the most relevant point made in this series.  The original Cosmos introduced science to the masses, before that, nobody had ever attempted such an ambitious show on science on national TV.  This Cosmos recognizes that it doesn't need to do the same thing, instead, it needed to remind us about what science really is, how it's being misused, and what we can do to claim it again for all the people of Earth.  We don't want science to be held by the elite, we want science to be for everyone.  So while the two series might be different in a lot of ways, in that one way, they are the same, and that's what's important.

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Supernovas in the Lab

Not literally, of course, but it's fairly close.  It's also pretty cool.  By firing a laser 60,000 billion times more powerful than your standard laser pointer at a thin carbon rod, scientists are able to approximate a supernova explosion.  This is very cool, of course, but they are doing this for a good reason.  Scientists expect supernovas to expand in all direction uniformly, but this is not always the case.  Sometimes they have twists and knots, and we're not entirely sure why that happens.  It was suspected that it was caused by patches of dust that interrupt the explosion, which in turn created magnetic fields that distort the star remains into unusual shapes, but we were never sure.  By placing objects in with the carbon rod, we were able to simulate stellar clouds of gas and dust, and the smaller experimental version of supernova behaved in the same way as regular supernova.  This is interesting news, but you know what?  I want to make a supernova with big giant lasers, that is something that I want to do.

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The Search Continues for the Source of All Matter

The Enriched Xenon Observatory, where the experiment took place.

It's one of the great mysteries of the very early universe.  Where did all the matter in the universe come from?  The current theories maintain that equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created just after the Big Bang, but obviously, this can't be the case.  There is a lot of matter floating around, but very little naturally occurring antimatter.  The answer to this conundrum could lie in Majorana particles, or particles that act as their own antimatter.  Such particles have been confirmed, but scientists wondered if neutrinos were also Majorana particles.  After a lengthy experiment, we've come up empty.

The lack of results doesn't necessarily prove that neutrinos don't act as their own antimatter particle, but it does make it unlikely.  The article also states that Majorana particles aren't the only way to reconcile the matter-antimatter disparity, of course, that research isn't going any better.  So, the mystery of matter continues on.

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Strange New Kind of Star Discovered

Astronomers have discovered the first Thorne-Zytkow Object, HV 2112 in the Small Magellanic Cloud.  This star was predicted in the mid 1970s by Kip Thorne and Anna Zytkow, and is actually a hybrid of two completely different kinds of stars.  They look like red supergiants, but TZO's contain a neutron star in the core.  It is believed this happens when a neutron star forms in a close binary orbit to a red supergiant, and the bigger star absorbs the neutron star, which ends up within the core of the supergiant.

This is a completely different type of stellar interior then we are used to, and it also is a potential means for heavy elements to form, one that does not require a supernova.  The scientists responsible for the study point out that there are a few inconsistencies, but nothing major, and the original theory is fairly old.  This star is probably a TZO.  You would think that there are only so many kinds of stars out there, but I wonder how many other strange new kinds of stars are floating around out in the universe, just waiting to be discovered. 

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New Kind of Rock Discovered

We've found a whole new type of rock in Hawaii, and it isn't what you might think.  Hawaii is very volcanic, so you might anticipate it's a new kind of igneous rock, but it isn't.  No, it's a plastic conglomerate that scientists are calling plastiglomerate.  Yes, plastic, which takes long enough to degrade as it is, can now become a rock, and hang around even longer.  It forms whenever the plastic melts and incorporates itself with whatever is around it. 

Originally scientists thought it was just unique to the area due to volcanism, but since there hasn't been any volcanic activity in that section of Hawaii since plastic was invented, it can't be that.  The best theory now is whenever plastic is burned for whatever reason it melds with the area around and forms these rocks.  Because of this, these plastic rocks are probably in many places all around the world, and are a permanent reminder of just how much we use plastic, and that we really don't take very good care of our disposal processes.

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Cosmos Episode 12 Thoughts

There was no episode last week, but there was today.  This was the second-to-last episode if the series, and the tone has definitely changed.  This Cosmos was always going to be different from the first one, and it definitely showed tonight.  The original focused more on revealing the wonders of the universe to a world that had never seen such things, this series exists more of a reminder and a gentle admonition of our rather lackluster stewardship of the planet.  Carl Sagan told us about our place in the universe and what we need to do to better the planet, Neil deGrasse Tyson is pushing us to follow through with our responsibilities.

Tonight was all about carbon dioxide.  It's a simple molecule, one carbon atom, two oxygen atoms, but it is responsible for so much.  Plants couldn't function without it, and without plants, there would be no animals, no people.  Without carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the planet would be frozen solid.  Life depends on carbon dioxide's property as a greenhouse gas, but there has to be a balance.  There is a planet in our solar system which shows us what happens when there is too much carbon dioxide, and it's right next door.  Both series have made allusions to Venus when talking about the greenhouse effect, and while Earth will never be as bad as Venus, it will take less than we think to make Earth a very harsh place.

It's not like this is a recent thing, the issue about global warming.  We've known about it for a long time, and as we learned tonight, there were multiple junctures throughout history where we could have gone down a path of clean, renewable energy.  Unfortunately, the great tides of society were never on the side of solar power, instead always moving towards cheap fossil fuels.  Now is the time for a switch to be made, and the transition is happening, but it is slow and painful, we are dragging it out with fossil fuels until the bitter end.  Big energy companies will give us clean energy eventually, but only after getting every last dollar out of fossil fuels, and for a nation that loves to criticize big business, we sure seem happy to keep doing what we're doing.  Maybe Tyson will have something to say about that in the finale, maybe not, actually, I hope not.  I don't want the series to end with an indictment of what we've done, but rather look out and to the future, to a brighter time for mankind.

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How Other Objects in the Solar System Effect Earth's Habitability

Jupiter is by far the most influential planet gravitationally speaking in our solar system, which makes sense, because it is the biggest.  It is constantly redirecting asteroids and comets one way or another, and you could make the argument that this helps or hurts the Earth.  Overall, Jupiter's effects on Earth probably balance out to being neutral.  But what if Jupiter had formed somewhere else in the solar system?  Would Earth still be habitable if it was much closer, or much further away?  The answer is interesting, but not for the reasons that I thought.

One of the most interesting things in that article is how the Moon influences Earth.  I've watched completely reputable shows and heard quite a bit about how the Moon is so important to maintaining our climate, and without it, Earth probably wouldn't even be habitable.  The idea that a large moon is key to life is a big tenet of the Rare Earth Hypothesis.  But according to this article, a planet without a large moon should remain stable for much longer than the Earth is going to with its moon.  If the Moon suddenly disappeared today, it would wreak havoc on Earth, but if the Moon had never been there, the problem of sudden destabilization wouldn't be present.

This whole business got scientists thinking about how big planets could help or hurt the habitability of habitable planets in the inner solar system.  So, scientists began running simulations on Jupiter, the only planet that has a really noticeable gravitational effect on Earth.  They brought in closer, they brought further away, they gave it an eccentric orbit, but for the most part, Earth's orbit and axis remained about the same.  There are some interesting implications to this study, for instance, it shows that compact solar systems are less likely to host habitable worlds because gravity would imbalance a small world quicker.  It also gives credence to the idea that solar system formation is a chaotic one, and that the places planets end up is as much up to chance as it is to physics.

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Orion Spacecraft Moving to Testing

Hopefully this will one day become more than just an artist's rendition.

Right now, and for the near future, the United States has no means of getting people into space.  Hopefully this will change in the near future as the Space Launch System and the Orion space capsule move into the testing stage.  The space shuttle was a worthy experiment, but an unsuccessful one.  The whole point of a reusable spacecraft was to reduce costs, but launching the shuttle was very expensive.  And while it was useful, it couldn't go very far.  What we need is a new heavy lift rocket capable of sending people not into low Earth orbit, but out into the solar system.  That is the ultimate goal of this new program, and I am looking forward to 2021, which is when manned flights are projected to begin. 

I don't know if the asteroid capture mission will be undertaken by an Orion ship, but of all the potential missions NASA could do, that's the one I want to see the most.  Actually catching an asteroid and bringing back to be studied would be an incredible feat of technology, and of tremendous value to science.  Of course, I'm in favor of anything that brings the wonder of space exploration closer to the average person.  Space is our future, we should get used to it.

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