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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