Volcanism in Virginia

I suppose that title is a bit misleading, there aren't any active volcanoes in Virginia, and there probably isn't going to be in human history.  However, Virginia does host quite the geologic oddity, something up until today I was completely unaware of.  48 million years ago, there was a bout of volcanic activity in Virginia, building up several mountains and in general rejuvenating the southern Appalachians, which is why they are higher and more rugged today than their northern counterparts.  48 million years is a long time, but considering that the last volcanic activity on the East Coast occurred 200 million years ago with the breakup of Pangaea, it's not nearly as long as it sounds.

Trimble Knob, the remnant of a 48 million year old volcano

This discovery itself is very recent, and scientists were completely baffled as to how something like this could happen in a geologically passive spot like Virginia, thousands of miles from any fault line.  Scientists may have an answer now.  The problem was that although the Virginia volcanoes resembled other hotspot volcanoes, the magma that formed them was not hot enough, the layer of magma was not thick enough, and the potential hotspot in question moved through 10 million years previously.  Also, the lack of volcanic islands off the Eastern seaboard further disproves the hotspot theory.  Instead, scientists believe that the crust below Virginia thinned through a process called delamination.  This allowed the slightly cooler magma to make its way to the surface.  This would explain the out-of-place volcanism and the fact that the mountains in the area are more rugged than they should be, considering their age.

Slight side note for fans of Kerbal Space Program: While looking up what delamination was exactly, I discovered that Moho was an actual geologic term, and not just a made up name for the innermost planet in the game.  The Moho is the boundary between the crust and the mantle.  Fun fact of the day.

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Cosmos Episode 8 Thoughts

For tonight's show, there was not just one star, but many.  Billions and billions of them.  Those little lights in the sky have confounded and inspired mankind for as long as we have had thoughts in our head, but it took us a very long time to truly understand them.  I have to confess, I missed the first five minutes because I was out getting groceries (it was the earliest I could get them), but from what I gathered, the first segment was about ancients and how they organized the stars into constellations, making sense of a chaotic system.  I thought the Aborgine system was particularly interesting, instead of using the stars, they used the great dark patches of the Milky in the same fashion.  A different solution to the same problem, but it worked for them.

Next we moved to the 1920's, and the efforts of a group of women who catalogued the stars, creating a classification system still used today.  So far, this show has done a very good job of weaving the story of unknown scientists with the story of the universe around us, but I didn't think that was the case today.  We got their story in one block, which took 15 minutes and was over when the show hit the halfway point.  I think it was a story worth telling, but today, I don't think it was told in the best fashion.

Eta Carinae within the Homunculus Nebula

The second half of the show was all about the stars, namely, what their lives are like, and how stars die.  Stars like our sun die fairly peacefully and become white dwarfs, while bigger stars suffer a more violent fate.  The supernova is an incredible event, and if one occurs close to Earth, it can dominate the night sky.  But, a star can die in an even more spectacular fashion.  Personally, I knew immediately that Tyson was talking about Eta Carinae, so the big lead-up didn't do much for me, but I think that it was a very interesting topic nonetheless.  It's a fascinating star, and when it goes, it will be spectacular.

Speaking of spectacular, the show closed with an incredible image, and what would probably be one of the greatest sights in the whole universe.  On a far-off world orbiting a sun in a globular cluster, a ball of a million stars hovering around the Milky Way, there would be sunrises and sunsets just like any other planet, but there would also be galaxy-rise.  Just imagine watching the enormity of our entire galaxy rising over the dark horizon, with its 200 billion stars shining in the darkness.  It's an image that the first Cosmos also gave us, and it is still just as incredible image now as it was then.

From Cosmos. Still as majestic as ever

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Quantum Mechanics and Why Your Food Cools Off

It seems like a simple question.  Why does a plate full of hot food cool off in a comparatively cool room.  It's a question addressed in the first law of thermodynamics, and it makes a lot of sense, intuitively speaking.  Of course heat is going to flow from an area of high temperature into an area of lower temperature until they reach equilibrium.  These laws of thermodynamics govern the fate of our entire universe, the inevitable flow of energy from an organized state into an unorganized state is known as entropy, and our universe is  bound to it.  Based on our observations of the universe, this seems to make sense, as the universe slowly moves from the ultra-condensed, ultra-ordered Big Bang state to the ultimate expression of entropy, the inevitable heat death of the universe, where only stray bits of energy remain. 

There is a big problem with entropy, however.  Physics is supposed to work both forwards and backwards.  The rules should be the same even if time is flowing backwards.  This is where thermodynamics runs into a problem.  Let's say you boil a pot of water and then turn the stove off.  Without a source of heat, the water will eventually cool off to the same temperature as the surrounding air.  Now, run that same scenario backwards.  For absolutely no reason, the water in the pot will begin to heat up, and there will be no reason why this will be occurring.  Sure, eventually the stove will turn on, but remember, time is flowing backwards in this scenario, and the cause cannot precede the effect, not according to physics, no matter which way time is flowing.  This, in a nutshell, is the problem of the arrow of time, a phrase coined by Arthur Eddington in the 1920's, and it has confounded scientists for a long time.

Scientists may have a solution to this fundamental problem with thermodynamics in quantum entanglement.  As with all quantum related things, entanglement defies common sense.  Basically, when two particles come into contact with each other, they interact with each other in an irreversible way, becoming entangled with each other.  Now, you could separate these particles, you could take them to opposite sides of the universe, but they would always remain related to each other.  If you've heard of Einstein's quote, "spooky action at a distance," he was referring to quantum entanglement.

What does quantum entanglement have to do with our hot pot of water?  According to this new theory, the information in the pot becomes entangled with the information in the surrounding air, leaking out and spreading around the environment.  The importance of this theory is that the information in the pot never actually disappears, it is just spread out into the universe.  This means that the entropy of the universe does not actually increase over time, but remains constant.  Quantum entanglement also means that it is possible for the pot to spontaneously heat itself again, although the likelihood of this is so small you would have to wait longer than the lifespan of the universe to witness it happening.  This is why the process was seen as being only one-way before, because there is no way to observe the opposite.

Of course, there are still problems with this theory, and it remains to be seen how practical it is in real-life applications.  But this theory does more than address why a pot of hot water cools off.  Another troubling issue concerning the arrow of time is how we perceive time, namely why we can remember the past but not the future.  With this new theory, there is a potential answer.  When we view something, the information becomes entangled with your brain, and only afterwards can you recall that information.  Basically, you are becoming entangle with your environment all the time.  It's an interesting idea, and we'll have to see where it can take us.

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Iapetus and the Incredibly Straight Mountain Range

Iapetus was made famous in the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, being the home of the third monolith, and the gateway for David Bowman's incredible voyage to the stars.  Arthur C. Clarke picked Iapetus over all the other moons of Saturn because of its curious coloration.

Iapetus' Equatorial Ridge

Half of the moon is a brilliant white, while the other is as black as coal.  Scientists are still not entirely sure as to the reason for this, but Iapetus' dual color scheme is not the most unusual feature of the moon.  The Cassini probe discovered a perfectly straight equatorial ridge running along a large portion of the moon, with some of the peaks reaching as high as 20 kilometers.  Perfectly straight geologic features are not a common occurrence, and there have been many theories as to how the ridge formed.

In a recent paper, scientists believe that they have the most likely reason for the ridge's existence.  The mountains are too steep to have been formed through traditional mountain building through plate tectonics, and Iapetus shows no signs of ever being volcanically active.  The paper states that an impact between Iapetus and another object that kicked off a lot of debris is the most likely source of the ridge.  The debris would have entered into orbit around Iapetus' equator and eventually fallen down, forming the ridge.  So, there may have been a time when Iapetus had a ring system.  Given that we recently discovered an asteroid with rings, a moon with rings doesn't seem so absurd.

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South Carolina Doesn't Want a State Fossil

There are quite a lot of people out there who truly believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old.  It doesn't matter to them what considerable amounts of scientific data says, they have their beliefs, and they're going to stick to them.  That's fine, people have a right to any opinion they want to have, and freedom of speech is a protected right in this country. 

When something like this happens, however, then we start to have a problem.  In South Carolina, an eight year old girl sent a letter to her state senator wanting to make the woolly mammoth the state fossil, because a mammoth fossil found in 1725 in South Carolina was one of the first fossils ever discovered in North America.  A lot of states have a state fossil, and this request certainly seemed reasonable enough.  However, the bill has been stalled because representatives who are devout creationists have a problem with the whole idea.

This may seem like something trivial, but church and state are supposed to remain separate.  Also, the fact that there are people in government who are willfully imposing beliefs that science has definitively proven wrong is terrible.  People have a right to think or say whatever they want, but we most certainly do not have to take whatever they say seriously.  We don't have to listen, but in today's world, it seems like we have to.  It seems like the right to free speech has become the right to demand your voice be given equal attention.  They're not the same thing, and frankly, that second one might even be dangerous.

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Energy from Space: A Dream

Our space program has accomplished a great deal throughout its illustrious history.  Yet, for every project that did go through, there were many that did not.  One of the most ambitious, and one that I hadn't heard of until today, was the Solar Power Satellite fleet.  I knew that the technology that this project was based on was possible, that a solar collecting station in orbit could beam down microwaves to Earth, providing power, but I had no idea that such an enormous project was on the books.

Basically, the project entailed building a fleet of massive solar panels in geosynchronous orbit around the equator, the advantage of this being that the panels would only be in shadow for a very brief time over the course of the year.  Most of the time, they would be pumping out power.  The logistics for this projects were incredible, it would have required massive amounts of resources, creating new heavy-lifter rockets several times bigger than anything previously built, and required hundreds of astronauts in orbit constantly for 30 years building the thing.

Unlike some of the other projects that never got past the drawing board, this one actually seems feasible.  The technology required was not beyond the realm of imagination, all that really needed to be done was to get enough investment to get such a massive endeavor off the ground.  Of course, that never happened, and we still depend on fossil fuels to power our world, rather than microwaves from space.  It may not have worked at all, but we don't know that.  All I know is that even within the realm of science, it is always worthwhile to dream.

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Cosmos Episode 7 Thoughts

This iteration of Cosmos has done a lot of things very well, and one of the most notable of those things is shining the spotlight on scientists who most people haven't heard of.  Tonight's episode was the most prominent example of this, as it was entirely devoted to the story of Clair Patterson and his efforts to discover the true age of the Earth.

To be honest, if I were to describe this episode to someone, it really wouldn't sound very interesting.  After all, the main star of the show, besides Patterson, is lead.  Without the decay of uranium into lead, it would have been impossible to discover the age of the Earth.  Really, this episode was more about the importance of pursuing the truth, especially in the presence of special interests.

When working to find the age of the Earth, Patterson discovered that most of the samples he was working with had a much higher concentration of lead than they should.  After years of travelling the world, collecting samples from basically everywhere, he discovered that the high concentration of lead was a recent phenomenon.  More specifically, he figured out that leaded gasoline was poisoning the population and was incredibly dangerous.  It took 20 years, but leaded gasoline was eventually banned, despite the immense power and influence of the petroleum industry.  The lesson here is that eventually, no matter how powerful the opponent, science and truth will win out in the end.  And that is good news.

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Exoplanet News

Using data from the Kepler satellite, scientists have found the first truly Earth-sized planet within the habitable zone of its star.  The planet, dubbed Kepler 186f, orbits at about the same distance as Mercury does around our sun, but because Kepler 186 is a red dwarf, it emits much less light and heat as the Sun does.  Because of this, Kepler 186f is actually on the outer half of the habitable zone, and receives less light than Earth does.  Despite this, scientists believe liquid water would probably exist on the surface, since unlike Mars, Kepler 186f is slightly bigger than Earth, and has more gravity to sustain a thick atmosphere.

Drawing by NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-CalTech

This is a significant discovery in many ways.  Kepler 186f is the first definitively rocky planet found within a star's habitable zone.  We've discovered many other planets in the habitable zone before, but they have all either been gas giants or super-Earths.  We don't understand super-Earths so well, but scientists believe that any planet with more than 1.5 times Earth radius becomes massive enough to hold a thick hydrogen atmosphere.  While these planets probably do have liquid water somewhere, they are also completely different to Earth, and not hospitable to life as we know it.  This planet is different.  With a radius of only 1.1 times that of Earth, Kepler 186f is too small to hold on to significant amounts of hydrogen.  This makes much more similar to the terrestrial planets of our own solar system than to the super-Earths previously discovered.  While scientists point out that because Kepler 186f orbits a red dwarf instead of a sun-like star and is more of an Earth cousin rather than an Earth twin, it is still by far, the most promising planet we've discovered in that regard.

Speaking of red dwarfs, up to this point scientists have not been entirely sure about their suitability for Earth-like planets.   The biggest problem is tidal locking.  The planets we've found within the habitable zone of red dwarfs before this have all been tidally locked to their star, which means they always present the same side to the star, like the Moon does with Earth.  These planets may be suitable for life, or they may not be, we just don't know.  Kepler 186f is far enough away from its star to maintain a rotation for billions of years, which makes it even more suitable for life as we know it.  This also means that red dwarfs have become legitimate places to look for Earth-like planets, which greatly increases the potential number, seeing as red dwarfs make up the vast majority of stars in the universe. 

We don't know yet if Kepler 186f is actually like Earth, we don't know what it looks like, we don't know what its atmosphere is made of, we don't know much about it except where it orbits and how big it is, and it may be a long time before we get any of those answers.  But now we've found one planet that may really be a lot like Earth, and this is only the beginning.  It's only been 20 years since the search for exoplanets really began, and look where we've come.  Just imagine how far we'll get in the next 20 years.

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Looking for Dark Energy

European scientists have come up with a potential way to detect dark energy.  Dark energy is a strange thing, even stranger than dark matter.  We know most of the parameters of dark matter, we just haven't been able to actually figure out what it is.  When it comes to dark energy though, we really don't know much.  We know that it's there, and some of its basic properties, but other than that, it's a mystery.

This technique will use slow moving neutrons, which come from a ultracold neutron source.  Neutrons are useful because they carry no electric charge and are only known to interact with gravity.  They might interact with other unknown forces, such as dark energy.  The advantage of the neutron detection method is that it is one hundred thousand times more accurate.  This all means that scientists can now look for dark energy in the lab, a huge step forward in the search for dark energy.

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April 15th Lunar Eclipse

I didn't get to see the eclipse last night.  I was fully prepared to stay up until 3:45 AM to witness totality, but the weather decided not to cooperate.  Rain wasn't having any of it.  If this had been a solar eclipse, I would have been sorely disappointed.  Solar eclipses are very rare, and only occur in very small bands.  I believe the next solar eclipse in the United States is in 2017, and I have every intention of traveling to wherever totality will be occurring.  A solar eclipse is something special, and is worth all the attention when they occur in populated areas.

Comparatively, lunar eclipses just aren't that special.  I've already seen at least two in my life, and there's going to be three more lunar eclipses in the next two years.  Sure, they're cool, but they're not really that impressive, or that rare.  I don't really care for the term "blood moon" because it implies some sort of ominous presence to a relatively common event.  The title of the article even has to assure the reader that this event isn't a sign of the apocalypse, which I might let slide on a general news site like CNN, but this is Space.com, a highly respected and important science news website.  I guess there hasn't been a lunar eclipse in the United States in the social media era, which is why there's been such a big deal about it.  I understand that the only way the general public is going to care about important scientific events like this is get them trending on social media, but I don't have to like it.  People should care about science because it's important, not because it's what people are talking about right now on Twitter.  That's the whole motivation behind the Cosmos reboot, science has taken a back seat in our society, and we need to bring it back to the forefront.


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(thank you irony)

Object in Saturn's Rings

According to NASA, Cassini has taken an image of an object in Saturn's rings which appears to be a small moonlet.  This object is newly dicovered, but is fairly small, being only about a half mile in diameter and is currently in the outer ring.  It appears to be moving out of the rings.  This represents an interesting opportunity here, Cassini may be witnessing the birth of a moon.  It's theorized that several of Saturn's moons were created in the same fashion, to be able to witness such an event would be remarkable.  Of course, as with all astronomical phenomenon, it'll probably take an extremely long time and we may never see the moon form completely.  But even seeing a bit of the process could tell us quite a bit.

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Cosmos Episode 6 Thoughts

The universe is more than stars and galaxies.  The massive cosmos we see around us is just one of many, and that is what tonight's episode was all about.  There are so many different worlds beyond what we can see, even in something as mundane as a drop of water.  That is where we started, examining the life that exists, and even flourishes, in a speck of early morning dew.  It's remarkable to think about how life can live in such a place, a drop of water that is only around for a couple of hours.  Or as my roommate said, "I'm never drinking water again."  Some people don't like drinking a whole bunch of microorganisms, I don't know.  I've always thought paramecium added a nice bit of flavor, but I guess I'm alone on that one.

Next we took a tour of a plant cell and a chloroplast, taking a peek at the remarkable process of photosynthesis.  Three billion years of tinkering has turned photosynthesis into an incredible workhorse.  If we could efficiently photosynthesize for our civilization's energy, we really wouldn't have any problems with energy anymore. 

As with all episodes of Cosmos, the past is as important as the present, or the future.  Today, we traveled back to ancient Greece, and the ancient scientist Democritus.  He was the first to posit that everything was made of tiny, indivisible particles, the first to realize that there was a world beyond what we could see.

Of course, all of these things, from the single celled organisms to the chloroplasts, even atoms themselves, are enormous compared to the neutrino.  There are literally billions of them passing through each one of us every second, yet it requires a gigantic pool of water in an elaborate chamber a half mile underground to reliably detect even a few of them.  They don't really interact much with matter, but they are still important, because as Tyson said, they can give us a window to the very early universe.  There is no light from the first 380,000 years of the universe, space was too dense to allow photons to pass through.  Neutrinos can pass right through, and neutrinos from the Big Bang could give us clues as to what the very early universe was doing.

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Kermadec Ocean Trench Expedition

This article talks about a new expedition which will examine life that resides in the Kermadec Trench, off the coast of New Zealand.  This trench is extreme, even as far as deep ocean trenches go, because the water flowing into it is from Antarctica, making it extremely cold.

These deep sea expeditions are always fascinating to learn about, because each one always brings back photos and videos of strange new forms of life.  There are so many species out there that we haven't found yet, it really is remarkable.  Anyway, I look forward to learning more as the expedition gets underway.

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First Potential Exomoon

Scientists may have found an exomoon, the first one ever discovered.  If it is a moon, then the system it resides in, MOA-2011-BLG-262, is an unusual one, because it would contain only a single Jupiter-sized planet and the moon.  No star.  Rogue planets, as such objects are called, are probably fairly common in the universe, but are extremely difficult to spot because they give off very little light.

You may have noticed that scientists aren't particularly sure if this is an exomoon or not.  That's because of the way the discovery was made.  The system was discovered using gravitational microlensing, which allows discovery of objects we would normally never be able to spot, but are events that only happen once.  In this case, the event revealed that there are two objects in the system, and the orbiting object has 0.05% of the mass compared to the main object.  

The issue here is that the scientists don't know how far away the system is.  The microlensing event doesn't reveal that.  If the system is far away, then the system is a dim star orbited by a smallish gas giant.  If the system is closer, than it's a rogue Jupiter orbited by a roughly Earth-sized moon.  The data we have indicates that it is a planet and moon, but a star and planet system is more likely to occur in nature.  Unfortunately, we'll probably never know the real truth, because microlensing events only ever reveal these objects once.  And since we don't know where the object is, we won't be able to look for it.  Finding it again would constitute a complete accident. 

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Spaceflight and Vision

Spaceflight is not good for the human body.  We've known for a long time that microgravity has a multitude of negative effects, most notably the weakening of bones.  This can be alleviated through extensive exercise, however, according to this article the effect of microgravity on our vision could be enough to stop a manned trip to Mars.

The fact that spaceflight can affect vision is not new, but scientists are only just realizing the extent of the problem.  60 percent of American astronauts who spend extended time on the International Space Station experienced visual degradation.  Scientists aren't entirely sure why this occurs, but the leading theory is that increased pressure in the skull is to blame, stemming from the fact that more fluids flow into the head while in a microgravity situation.

The big problem is that no one knows if the degradation will continue to occur indefinitely over an even longer time frame or if it will plateau over time.  This question will become crucial to answer as we develop spacecraft capable of long-term space travel.  It won't be brilliant if the astronauts get to Mars and can't see it because space ruined their eyesight.

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Antimatter and Gravity

Antimatter is weird stuff.  There's a reason it features so prominently in science fiction, who know what strange things we may be able to do with it someday.  For now though, we don't know very much about it.  This article details an experiment which seeks to understand a very basic and at the same time rather amusing aspect of antimatter.  Does it fall up or down? 

This sounds like a pretty silly question, but antimatter behaves completely differently than normal matter (obviously), and we actually don't know all that much about gravity either.  The experiment is pretty simple, actually.  The scientists are going to take anti-hydrogen, drop it, and see what happens.  The equipment is incredibly advanced because antimatter is immediately destroyed when it comes into contact with normal matter, but the premise is exactly what you would expect.  I look forward to finding out if antimatter falls up or down.

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Cosmos Episode 5 Thoughts

Light really is incredible.  That's why we had an entire episode tonight devoted to light, and more specifically, what light is.  I really like the focus on scientists who, until now, were completely unknown outside the mainstream.  Until this point, I had known of all the scientists that have been featured, but I have to confess, I had no idea who Joseph von Fraunhofer was.  Optics has never really been my thing, so I guess that's not too surprising.

Tonight, we started off in ancient China, and how a Chinese astronomer (whose name eludes me) was the first to really experiment with light, along with a stern warning about how science requires freedom of expression to thrive.  It's true, you can't exactly do much science if you're not allowed to question the status quo.  Next we moved to medieval Iraq, and the scientist Ibn al-Haytham, the father of modern optics.  His work was revolutionary, but equally important in this segment was that for several hundred years, the Middle East was the center of science and free expression.  Funny enough, I'd recently done a bit of research into the Abbasid Caliphate, the empire that al-Haytham worked in, and it was simply remarkable.  We owe so much to them, and they are for the most part left out of the history books.  I guess you can blame the Mongols for that one.

After a brief detour at Isaac Newton's house, when he nearly discovered spectroscopy, and to William Herschel discovering that there is more light then what we can see; the show moves to early 19th century Bavaria, and to the most important figure of the episode, Joseph von Fraunhofer.  His life is just another example of how sometimes, things just come down to luck.  If that house hadn't collapsed, how much longer would it have taken for someone to discover the revolutionary science of spectroscopy?  At the same time, how much more would we know now if Isaac Newton had gotten to it first?  He was obsessed with optics, he could have easily done it.

Of course, the most important player in all of this is light itself, which is absolutely remarkable in every way.  We haven't even learned everything there is to know about light yet, it get even stranger from here.  I enjoyed the ending segment, seeing the city illuminated in every time of light, not just in visible.  The X-ray city was particularly cool-looking.  It really is incredible how much we don't see, but at the same time, we can see so much.

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Cancer Cells Consume Themselves to Survive

Research has shown that cancer cells can survive chemotherapy through autophagy.  This ability allows cancer to reoccur after chemotherapy.

Autophagy is the process of certain organelles breaking down unnecessary cellular components for energy in times of low energy or a hostile environment.  During chemotherapy, it is possible for cancer cells to have higher levels of autophagy than normal, and in those cases, the cell can recover and divide.

This has important implications for the future treatment of cancer.  It tells doctors more about how cancer cells can recover, and it also advances our ability to treat cancer.  A medication that inhibits autophagy while a patient is undergoing chemotherapy would make the cancer much more vulnerable to the chemo. 

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The Origin of Florida

As it turns out, Florida was not always part of North America.  It makes sense, after all, most of the state is just sort of sticking out awkwardly from the rest of the continent.  Scientists have come to the conclusion that Florida used to be part of either South America or Africa, but collided with North America about 300 million years ago.  They came to this conclusion after analyzing an ususual geologic feature called the Brunswick Magnetic Anomaly.

This discovery was based in the ongoing effort to understand North America's tectonic history.  The Brunswick Anomaly stretches across the southeastern United States, and debate on it focuses on whether it was formed 200 million years ago when Pangaea split up, or much earlier when the continents first collided.  Evidence shows that the anomaly seems to have formed earlier, the event that formed the southern Appalachians.  It looks like this collision also resulted in Florida breaking off from its original home and sticking to North America.

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Enceladus Underground Ocean

It has been known for a few years now that liquid water was present on Saturn's moon, Enceladus, but the question was, how much water was there?  Cassini data has recently revealed the likely extent of the water, and it appears to be a fully-fledged ocean underneath the ice.

Water Plumes on Enceladus

According to the data, the mass of the liquid water is only about that of Lake Superior, but considering that Enceladus is only 300 miles across, this translates to a potentially moon-wide ocean that is on average 6 miles deep, underneath about 20 miles of ice.

Cassini was able to detect the presence of liquid water through precise gravitational mapping.  Simply put, Cassini's close encounters with Enceladus were gravitationally affected more than it should have been had there been only solid ice.  This indicates the presence of liquid water, which is more dense and would give the moon slightly more mass.

As of right now, scientists are not sure if the ocean is global or not, because Cassini's close fly-bys were over the southern hemisphere.  However, they are very certain that an ocean exists under the southern hemisphere.  This discovery puts Enceladus right at the top of candidates for alien life in our solar system.  It also becomes the easiest target for further exploration into extraterrestrial life, because it is constantly shooting off water into space, which a probe can analyze.  Cassini's basic instruments have already detected carbon and other basic organic molecules, a more advanced instrument could potentially detect far more.  This alone makes it a more inviting target than Europa, which is similar in many ways but may not have active water jets.

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Coffee Reduces Risk of Death from Cirrhosis

I've never drank coffee in my life.  I know it's difficult to imagine someone who recently graduated from college who's never had coffee, but there it is.  Looking at this article though, it seems like drinking coffee may have some benefits.

In a recent issue of Hepatology, research has concluded that drinking two or more cups of coffee a day reduces risk of death from liver cirrhosis by as much as 66%

These results come from the Singapore Chinese Health Study, which monitored the health of over 63,000 people from the ages of 45 to 74 from 1993 to 1998.  During this period, 114 died from liver cirrhosis.

The findings indicate that drinking at least 20 g of ethanol daily highly increased the risk of liver cirrhosis, while subjects who drank at least two cups of coffee had a much reduced risk of liver cirrhosis.

Liver cirrhosis has been identified as the 11th leading cause of death in the United States by the World Health Organization, with the disease attributed to 1.3% of deaths worldwide.


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