The Daily Galaxy: Great Discoveries Channel

"The METI Controversy": Should Detection by an Exo Civilization Be Viewed as a Threat?

2009-07-14T00:15:00-07:00

If we should pick up signals from alien civilizations, Stephen Hawking, our century's Einstein, warns: "we should have be wary of answering back, until we have evolved" a bit further. Meeting a more advanced civilization, at our present stage,' Hawking says "might be a bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus. I don't think they were better off for it."

Mankind has always been driven by contradictory drives. The relentless curiosity that pushes us forward and is directly responsible for our progress from caves to cities. The fear of change that tells us "hang on, these caves/cities are really nice, we don't want to risk losing them." There isn't any greater potential threat to the status quo than the discovery of extraterrestrial life, which is why some people would prefer we didn't try.

There has been some outrage recently over attempts to contact intelligent aliens, where instead of hiding in the corner and listening real hard some astronomers beamed intense directional messages up up and away. Critics decried these actions as dangerous, though their fears reveal more about us than any eventual ETs. They assume that they would be similar to humanity, so their first response to finding a more primitive culture would be to exploit the hell out of it. While such a fate might be pleasingly ironic (for anyone who isn't human, at least), others contend that any species that can make the journey here has advanced to a point where their goals are rather higher-minded than "Shoot us".

Dr Alexander Zaitzev, of the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, doesn't think much of these worries either way. A proponent of METI (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), in a recent paper he shows that the odds of one of the METI messages being detected is a millionth of that due to powerful radar pulses regularly used in astronomical investigation. Though whether writing a paper saying "This METI thing we're doing has only a tiny chance of working" is overall a good idea remains to be seen. An important point is that METI represents an intentional will to make contact, rather than the accidental alien interception of some random radiation from Earth - the difference between saying "Hello!" and just being a suspicious strange noise late at night.

Most of the objections to contacting aliens are weak under close examination. We can't suddenly decide to hide after fifty years of pumping electromagnetic radiation into space without rhyme or reason - in fact, we'd better hope that an advanced civilization doesn't catch an episode of "American Idol" and just vaporize us outright. Suddenly keeping quiet would be like a drunk boyfriend carefully taking off his shoes after knocking over a bookshelf on his way to the bedroom.

Then there's the assumption that aliens would have the same kind of technology we do - despite the extremely obvious fact that our technology can't actually get to other exo planets. Any attempt to mask radio emissions will likely look like cavemen closing their eyes to hide from satellite imaging.

The simple fact is that certain people have always opposed progress while other, better people have driven it. "Experts" decried boiled water as unhealthy compared the vital stuff straight from the river, cursed antibiotics as a temporary placebo, and confidently declared that computers were nothing but expensive toys. As an intelligent species we must make every effort to contact anyone (or thing) we can.

Edited and Reposted for commentary by Luke McKinney.

Related Galaxy posts:

Stephen Hawking: Why Isn't the Milky Way "Crawling With Self-Designing Mechanical or Biological Life?"

Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution"
Stephen Hawking: "Asteroid Impacts Biggest Threat to Intelligent Life in the Galaxy"

Related Galaxy posts:

The 10,000 Year Explosion: Has Human Civilization Turbo Charged Evolution?
Homo Sapiens -The "Time Travelers" -A Galaxy Classic
“Hyper-Speed” Evolution Discovered
Bringing Ancient Human Viruses Back to Life: A Jurassic Park or Salvation?

Immense Journey

Source: http://www.rationalvedanta.net/node/131

The Next Tech Frontier: Hacking Your Head

2009-07-13T01:00:00-07:00

There is no doubt that brain-computer interfaces will arrive - because they're already here, in simple forms, and we'll have movie-style mind links within a decade at most. Which makes the movie idea of mind-hacking (as in Ghost In The Shell) an extremely serious problem. Never mind how you keep all your most important files up there (little things like "me.exe") - if it gets damaged, unless you're a Buddhist there's no Ctrl-Alt-Delete.

The risk comes from the combination of the very best of technologized humanity with the worst: when medical experts and mindologists are building devices to let paralyzed patients communicate with the world, they shouldn't be worrying about some scumbag hacking the system for a joke. If you don't think people would do that, welcome to the internet and don't give anyone any personal information. As the technology advances out of medicine and into mass media (as it inevitably will) it'll only get worse.

If you use the internet you know how much damage someone can do to you with just an image, and that's just visual meme injection - mental malware a whole new world of sabotage. Viruses propagate because of exploits in existing system - every copy of a program by definition suffers the same flaws, so a single exploit can spread through the entire network. Every mind is different, however, with even the most basic functions slightly differently mapped in every head so you don't have the same rapid-infection risk - but you do have a far more chance of malicious code interacting in unexpected ways and simply breaking part of your soul while it's in there, with no way to restore it.

The new neologism is "neurosecurity", an excellent addition to the language (which has only been used in infinity-billion sci-fi stories already). If nothing else, you should be terrified of a cerebral SirCam - imagine a virus pulling a random thought from your head and telling everyone you know.

Brain Hacking http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/10/mind.hacking/

MIT's "MetaMaterials": Optical Clothing for a James-Bond World

2009-07-13T00:58:00-07:00

With cameras in everything from phones to other, smaller phones, it may seem we've caught up with Q branch (the fictional research and development division of the British Secret Service) - which is why the boffins have built an imager without any camera at all. That'll teach us to think we know anything! A brand new nanofabric which can be used as cloth is now collecting images - meaning paparrazzi will soon be irrelevant, as we'll be able to get nude pictures direct from the clothing.

MIT researchers developed a sophisticated nanotech mesh with woven semiconductor fibers able to detect incoming light. Each fiber can relay its reception via sub-millimeter electrical contacts, and an external computer reconstructs the image from the inputs (extrapolating from the signals from all fibers and a recording of the design of the fabric). The optofabric has already been used to detect a smiley face, meaning it can read half the internet (once it gets fleshtones it'll have the other half).

This is the extreme other end of the "optical cloth" tactical spectrum. With most attention still on the idea of invisibility cloaks, metamaterials designed to redirect light around you, the increased information structure of the modern world means that detecting that light is far more useful. If you're invisible, you're helping yourself - if you're relaying all the data in all directions, you're helping everyone with you.

The are still several hurdles to clear before your fashion can Flickr photos for you - the fibers can only detect two frequencies of light, and it would take an immense amount of computing power to reconstruct any but the smallest images, never mind a full three-D map. And while the fiber doesn't need lenses, we still use the things for a reason - there's only a certain amount of data you can collect without them. But if you were to network the fibercloth of a team of people, or even an entire city, you gain whole new levels of information. Whether this is the ultimate security or Big Brother Boutique is up to your attitude.

Camera-like Fabric http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-10281376-39.html

Google Maps, Submarine Tunnels & Spy Satellites -A Galaxy Classic

2009-07-13T00:12:00-07:00

There was a time when you could walk down the street with an index finger on a spelunking mission, fairly sure the world wouldn't share a chuckle over a photo of the act. Thanks to the Street View feature of Google Maps, Murphy's Law dictates that this will happen to you. Tomorrow. The defense? Wear a very large hat.

So I was quite surprised by an article I read in the San Francisco Chronicle about sensitive Israel security installations being "jeopardized" by Google Maps. Clearly, issues such as labeling and mass distribution transcend the origin of these photos. The irony is, most "top-secret" sites-- in Israel or anywhere else-- tend to be surrounded by tall fences, German shepherds, and roving bands of guards with very large machine guns. Shhh! Don't tell anyone where the Pentagon's located.

Granted, it is access that's an issue-- photographs "where anyone can get them," as the cliche goes. But John Anyone is looking for topless sunbathers, not nuclear weapons facilities. As for relationships between governments regarding one another as hostile (possessing the motivation, sophistication and resources necessary for actual physical interaction with these sites), spying from above is old news. Very old. When the United States' National Security Agency, National Reconnaissance Office and Naval Research Lab declassified information about a project called POPPY, we learned that such snooping from above has been happening since 1962. Even earlier, the U2 spy plane controversy served as a wake-up call to invest in large tarps... some 47 years ago!

The Chinese seemed to have taken heed-- the Washington Post having revealed what appears to be a "submarine tunnel" at the Jianggezhuang Base on the Yellow Sea. The U.S. and Russia have no doubt already adopted similar clandestine measures... if none such have been discovered, that could just mean they're working!

Gretel Ehrlich's book, This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland, includes excerpts from a Japanese film crew's interview of expatriate Ikuo Oshima, conducted in 1997. He had a unique perspective on the subject:

"When I look up at the night sky I see satellites. Now I hear about the ones that are so strong, they can see a car license... I still get my food with a harpoon, same as the hunters a thousand years ago. This makes me wonder what that satellite sees: on one side of the world it sees Tokyo and on the other side it sees me standing at the ice edge dressed in polar bear pants and holding a harpoon. What does this make the satellite feel? Maybe confused and broken."

by Eric Duby

Today's Most Popular Posts

2009-07-13T00:06:00-07:00

The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (7/12)

2009-07-13T00:04:00-07:00

Skyscrapers As Unbreakable as ... Glass?

With new technology, builders are imagining structures made entirely of glass. A project lets visitors see all angles from the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower in Chicago. Builders are experimenting with new materials and methods to expand the use of glass in construction.

IPhone Apps to Organize Your Life

Do you sometimes feel yourself slipping into an organizational abyss? Do you get behind in your e-mail, overlook a few appointments, forget your mom’s birthday and neglect to pick up milk on the way home?

Dinosaur discovery provides climate change clues

The find, to be published this month in Cretaceous Research, suggests that burrowing behaviors were shared by dinosaurs of different species, in different hemispheres, and spanned millions of years during the Cretaceous Period, when some dinosaurs lived in polar environments. "This research helps us to better understand long-term geologic change, and how organisms may have adapted as the Earth has undergone periods of global cooling and warming," says Martin, a senior lecturer in environmental studies at Emory.

Israel Creates "Internet Warfare" Squad

The Israeli Foreign Ministry unveiled a new plan to pay "talkbackers" -“Internet warfare” squad-to post pro-Israel responses on websites worldwide. The plan calls for the hire of young people who speak at least one language and who study communication, political science, or law – or alternately, Israelis with military experience gained at units dealing with information analysis.

Galaxy Fans -Your Clicks Help

2009-07-13T00:00:00-07:00

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Please give our advertisers your support -click on the ads, and enjoy the site.

We donate 10% of our ad revenue to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) for their efforts to save the planet's endangered species, such as the blue whale.

With thanks...The Editorial Team

Ridley Scott: "After 2001 -A Space Odyssey, Science Fiction is Dead"

2009-07-10T18:07:52-07:00

In a speech at the 2007 Venice Film Festival at special screening of his seminal noir thriller Blade Runner, Sir Ridley Scott, the legendary director of Alien, announced that he believes that science-fiction as a genre is dead -gone the way of Westerns.

Scott believes, as we do at The Daily Galaxy, that although the flashy special effects of block-busters such as The Matrix, Independence Day and The War of the Worlds, may sell at the box office, that none can beat Stanley Kubrick’s haunting 1968 epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film is as fresh (and perhaps more relevant) today as the day it premiered.

The video at the end of the post -Kubrick 2001 -The Space Odyssey Explained- is a minor masterpiece in itself and is not to be missed.

“There’s nothing original. We’ve seen it all before. Been there. Done it,” Scott said.

Made at the height of the “space race” between the United States and the USSR, 2001 predicted a world of malevolent computers and routine space travel. Kubrick had such a fanatical eye for detail, he employed Nasa experts in designing the spacecraft.

Sir Ridley said that 2001 was “the best of the best”, in use of lighting, special effects and atmosphere, adding that every sci-fi film since had imitated or referred to it. “There is an over reliance on special effects as well as weak storylines,” he said of modern sci-fi films.

More than anything, 2001 and its journey from the origins of life in prehistoric Africa in 4 million BC to Jupiter, where a new creature, the HAL 9000 computer inhabits the dark void of space. The film is Kubrick's philosophical statement about humanity's place in the universe, about where we as humans rate in the pecking order of life -- "feral, intelligent and hyper-intelligent."

The famous Monoliths at the opening of the film and the Star Child at the end indicates that entities have reached a higher level of consciousness. Despite the fact that humanity remains more or less earthbound, Kubrick -- through his strange, infuriating and by turns terrifying movie points towards our future: to our destiny beyond the Solar System.

The film's primary themes include the origins of evolution; sentient computers; extra-terrestrial beings; the search for one's place in the universe; and re-birth all seen within a cold, foreboding light. Viewers often read the monoliths as signposts of our discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Shortly after the film's release, however, Kubrick told a New York Times reporter that it's more a matter of the other beings discovering us.

Steven Spielberg called 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968) his generation's "big bang," focusing its attention upon the Russo-American space race -a prelude to orbiting and landing on the Moon with Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969. And it prophetically showed the enduring influence that computers would have in our daily lives.

The special effects techniques Kubrick pioneered were further developed by Ridley Scott and George Lucas for films such as Alien and Star Wars. 2001 is particularly notable as one of the few films realistically presenting travel in outer space, with scenes in outer space completely silent; weightlessness is constant, with characters are strapped in place; when characters wear pressure suits, only their breathing is audible.

Stanley Kubrick -director of Dr Strangelove, Lolita, and Clockwork Orange- spent five years developing 2001, collaborating with SF legend Arthur C. Clarke on the script, expanding on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel". The screenplay and the novel were written simultaneously. The novel and the film deviate substantially from each other, with the novel explaining a great deal of what the film leaves deliberately ambiguous.

The film is notable for its use of classical music, such as Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra and Johann Strauss's The Blue Danube waltz, as well the music of contemporary, avant-garde Hungarian composer, György Ligeti (though this was done without Ligeti's consent). Atmospheres, Lux Aeterna, and Requiem on the 2001 soundtrack was the first wide commercial exposure of Ligeti's work.

The moon docking sequence, which preceded the actual moon landing by a year, looks remarkably accurate. It's no wonder so many people believe the Apollo 11 landing was filmed on a Hollywood sound stage -- Kubrick had already done it, and he made it look easy.

One of the more crucial elements of 2001 is the lack of sound that dominates the film, which is true to that there would be no sound in space (no atmosphere means no medium for sound transmission).

The real drama begins when HAL, one of cinema's all-time evil and terrifying characters, makes his appearance. The HAL 9000: a malevolent, homicidal, and sightly effete (he sings "Daisy")) intelligent computer that controls the operations of the spaceship Discovery, which is on its way to Jupiter with a team of astronauts to explore the monoliths' origins.

In the movie's climatic sequence, Discovery crewmen David Bowman and Frank Poole attempt to disable the computer after the stability of his programming becomes suspect. Omnipotent in their microcosmic on-board setting, HAL doesn't take kindly to this suggestion. Bowman and Poole hole themselves up in space pod to engage in what they think is a private conversation. HAL, however, watches, reading their lips. Not good...

Sir Ridley is one of Britain’s most acclaimed film-makers. His extraordinary number of box-office hits include Alien – another sci-fi classic, best remembered for the scene of an infant creature bursting through John Hurt’s chest – as well as Thelma & Louise, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down.

But it is for Blade Runner that sci-fi fans revere him most. Ridley's vision, writes Cinematical writer Kevin Kelly, turned Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? "into a look at a dystopian future that still influences the look and feel of science fiction films to this day."

Scott began his feature film directing career with The Duellists, a small but dazzling masterpiece, which brought him the Grand Jury Prize at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival. His second film was the breakthrough hit Alien, which won an Academy Award for Special Effects. This was followed by Blade Runner, now considered one of the landmark science fiction films of all time. In 2003, Scott was knighted by the Queen of England.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Related Galaxy posts:

For the rest of the 2001 plot action, don't miss this video:

Kubrick 2001 The Space Odyssey Explained -Video

"Andromeda Strain 2" - Is a Pandemic from Space Possible?

Future Present -Science Fiction as Prelude

James Cameron & Arthur C Clarke on Space Odyssey 2001 -A Video

"42": Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Foreshadows Actual Weight of Universe!

"On Two Planets" & "War of the Worlds" -The Origins of Science Fiction

Sunshine -Heir to Space Odyssey 2001

Orson Wells & his 1938 Mercury Theater Broadcast of H.G. Wells "War of the Worlds"

Video Link

http://www.cinematical.com/2007/07/31/comic-con-ridley-scott-talks-to-us-about-blade-runner/

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article2351086.ece

Stephen Hawking: Why Isn't the Milky Way "Crawling With Self-Designing Mechanical or Biological Life?"

2009-07-10T18:02:24-07:00

In his famous lecture on Life in the Universe, Stephen Hawking asks: "What are the chances that we will encounter some alien form of life, as we explore the galaxy?"

If the argument about the time scale for the appearance of life on Earth is correct, Hawking says "there ought to be many other stars, whose planets have life on them. Some of these stellar systems could have formed 5 billion years before the Earth. So why is the galaxy not crawling with self-designing mechanical or biological life forms?"

Why hasn't the Earth been visited, and even colonized? Hawking asks. "I discount suggestions that UFO's contain beings from outer space. I think any visits by aliens, would be much more obvious, and probably also, much more unpleasant."

Hawking continues: "What is the explanation of why we have not been visited? \One possibility is that the argument, about the appearance of life on Earth, is wrong. Maybe the probability of life spontaneously appearing is so low, that Earth is the only planet in the galaxy, or in the observable universe, in which it happened. Another possibility is that there was a reasonable probability of forming self reproducing systems, like cells, but that most of these forms of life did not evolve intelligence."

We are used to thinking of intelligent life, as an inevitable consequence of evolution, Hawking emphasized, but it is more likely that evolution is a random process, with intelligence as only one of a large number of possible outcomes.

Intelligence, Hawking believes contrary to our human-centric existece, may not have any long-term survival value. In comparison the microbial world, will live on, even if all other life on Earth is wiped out by our actions. Hawking's main insight is that intelligence was an unlikely development for life on Earth, from the chronology of evolution: "It took a very long time, two and a half billion years, to go from single cells to multi-cell beings, which are a necessary precursor to intelligence. This is a good fraction of the total time available, before the Sun blows up. So it would be consistent with the hypothesis, that the probability for life to develop intelligence, is low. In this case, we might expect to find many other life forms in the galaxy, but we are unlikely to find intelligent life."

Another possibility is that there is a reasonable probability for life to form, and to evolve to intelligent beings, but at some point in their technological development "the system becomes unstable, and the intelligent life destroys itself. This would be a very pessimistic conclusion. I very much hope it isn't true."

Hawkling prefers another possibility: that there are other forms of intelligent life out there, but that we have been overlooked. If we should pick up signals from alien civilizations, Hawking warns,"we should have be wary of answering back, until we have evolved" a bit further. Meeting a more advanced civilization, at our present stage,' Hawking says "might be a bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus. I don't think they were better off for it."

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Image Credit: www.astro.columbia.edu/~astrobio/ProjectsII.html

This is the third in a three-part series on Stephen Hawking's views on life in the universe:

Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution"
Stephen Hawking: "Asteroid Impacts Biggest Threat to Intelligent Life in the Galaxy"

Related Galaxy posts:

The METI Controversy (Revisited) : Should Detection by an Exo Civilization Be Viewed as a Threat?

Immense Journey

Source: http://www.rationalvedanta.net/node/131

FYI: We've Hired a Worldclass Copy Editor (By Popular Request!)

2009-07-10T17:00:00-07:00

Jean Morgan, formerly with Conde Nast and Slate, starts at The Daily Galaxy next week. No more typos! (Well, maybe one or two, here and there).

Image credit: Our thanks to Gawker.com

The 1,700-Foot Tusnami That Struck Alaska -Can It Happen Again?

2009-07-10T00:30:00-07:00

On the night of July 7th, 1958, the world’s largest wave in recorded history engorged Alaska's Lituya bay, located about 250 miles west of Juneau in the Gulf of Alaska. It was 1,700 feet, or 520 meters -almost twice the height of the Eiffel Tower.

The tsunami was triggered by a magnitude 8.3 earthquake, which caused an enormous landslide along the Fairweather Fault. The resulting crash of rock into water caused the largest wall of water in human history. The deadly wave hurtled at jet speeds and wiped out everything within a four mile radius.

Fortunately Lituya Bay was virtually uninhabited, otherwise it would have caused unprecedented destruction, far greater than the tsunami that struck Thailand in 2004.

At the time of the colossal wave, there were only three fishing boats anchored out in the bay and amazingly only one sank, with two people losing their lives. The other boats were able to surf the crest of the tsunami.

The Science Channel and Dr George PC quoted one of the survivors Howard G. Ulrich in a recent article about the wave impact: Ulrich heard the sound of the enormous wave ripping through the land and obscuring the sky, he reportedly said to his 8-year-old child “Son…it’s time to pray.”

Can a similar tsunami strike the west coast of the U.S. again? Geological evidence makes it almost a certainty -the region is the heart of the world's most active sesmic zone: the Pacific Rim of Fire.

On January the 26th, 1700, sometime around 9 p.m. local time, the Juan de Fuca segment of the planet shifted -suddenly. It slipped some 60 feet eastward beneath the North American plate, and caused a monster magnitude 9 quake. It set in motion tsunamis that struck the coast of North America and traveled to the shores of Japan.

Seismic research shows that these mega quakes occur every 400 to 500 years.

Kim Olsen of San Diego State University (SDSU) and his team created a supercomputer-powered “virtual earthquake” program that allowed them to recreate such an event. This program encompassed the work of scientists from SDSU, San Diego Supercomputer Center at University of California/San Diego, and the U.S. Geological Survey.

To ensure that the entire representation of what could happen is accurate, William Stephenson of the U.S. Geological Survey worked with Olsen and Andreas Geisselmeyer from Ulm University in Germany to create an accurate representation of the earth’s subsurface layering that area. This “velocity model” – the first of its kind – expressed how the structure will bend, reflect, and change in size and direction.

Their scenario depicted a rupture beginning in the north and propagating toward the south along the 600-mile long Cascadia Subduction Zone (an area where two tectonic plates move towards one another, forcing one to slide beneath the other). In their scenario, the ground moved about 1.5 feet per second in Seattle, nearly 6 inches per second in Tacoma, Olympia and Vancouver, and 3 inches in Portland, Oregon.

“We also found that these high ground velocities were accompanied by significant low-frequency shaking, like what you feel in a roller coaster, that lasted as long as five minutes – and that’s a long time,” said Olsen.

“One thing these studies will hopefully do is to raise awareness of the possibility of mega-thrust earthquakes happening at any given time in the Pacific Northwest,” Olsen added. “Because these events will tend to occur several hundred kilometers from major cities, the study also implies that the region could benefit from an early warning system that can allow time for protective actions before the brunt of the shaking starts.”

This is bad news for the North West for two reasons: one, because the combined long-duration shaking and high ground velocities raise the possibility that such an earthquake could inflict major damage on downtown Seattle; and two, areas like Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia sit on top of sediment filled geological basins, thus, amplifying the waves generated by major earthquakes.

“The information from these simulations can also play a role in research into the hazards posed by large tsunamis," added Olsen, "which can originate from such mega-thrust earthquakes like the ones generated in the 2004 Sumatra-Andeman earthquake in Indonesia."

Posted by Casey Kazan with Josh Hill.

[Apologies, all: somehow we missed giving this post our usual copy-edit scrubbing when it was first posted at 12:15 this a.m.]

"The Anthropocene": Are We Living in a New Geological Era? Experts Say "Yes"

2009-07-10T00:12:00-07:00

No one can realistically argue that humans haven’t dramatically transformed the face of the planet. But now scientists, who love naming things, propose that humankind has so altered the Earth that that we have brought about an end to one epoch and entered a new age, as different from our recent ancestors' time as the Jurassic was from the Cambrian.

Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen calls it the Anthropocene, with "anthro" signifying humanity's biospheric impact. They suggest humans have so changed the Earth that it’s time the Holocene epoch was officially ended.

In 2000, Crutzen, best known for his research on ozone depletion, currently with the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, and Eugene F. Stoermer, emphasized the central role of mankind in geology and ecology.

They proposed using the term anthropocene for the current geological epoch: "To assign a more specific date to the onset of the 'anthropocene" seems somewhat arbitrary, but we propose the latter part of the 18th century, although we are aware that alternative proposals can be made (some may even want to include the entire holocene). However, we choose this date because, during the past two centuries, the global effects of human activities have become clearly noticeable. This is the period when data retrieved from glacial ice cores show the beginning of a growth in the atmospheric concentrations of several 'greenhouse gases", in particular CO2 and CH4. Such a starting date also coincides with James Watt's invention of the steam engine in 1784."

Geologists from the University of Leicester, Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams, and their colleagues on the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London say that humankind has entered a phase where we are so rapidly transforming the planet that a new era has started. Duke University soil scientist Daniel Richter agrees. He says the dirt under our feet is being so changed by humans that it is now appropriate to call this epoch the Anthropocene.

“With more than half of all soils on Earth now being cultivated for food crops, grazed, or periodically logged for wood, how to sustain Earth’s soils is becoming a major scientific and policy issue,” Richter said.

Zalasiewicz and Williams research, which appears in the journal GSA, states that, “sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene—currently a vivid yet informal metaphor of global environmental change—as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization by international discussion.”

Their study specifically identified human impact through phenomena which includes:

• Transformed patterns of sediment erosion and deposition worldwide
• Major disturbances to the carbon cycle and global temperature
• Wholesale changes to the world’s plants and animals
• Ocean acidification

The geologists analyzed the proposal made by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen. In 2002 Crutzen suggested the Earth had left the Holocene and started the Anthropocene era due to the global environmental effects of increased human population and economic development.

The researchers show how the dominance of humans has so physically changed Earth that there is increasingly less justification for linking pre- and post-industrialized Earth within the same epoch, known as the Holocene.

The scientists said their findings present the scholarly groundwork for consideration by the International Commission on Stratigraphy for formal adoption of the Anthropocene as the youngest epoch of, and most recent addition to, the Earth's geological timescale.

Of course the implication of entering the Anthropocene epoch goes far behind designating a formal name. Richter says that there are many serious questions facing us at this moment in time during Earth’s long and colorful history.

“Society’s most important scientific questions include the future of Earth’s soil,” Richter added. "Can soils double food production in the next few decades? Is soil exacerbating the global carbon cycle and climatic warming? How can land management improve soil’s processing of carbon, nutrients, wastes, toxics and water, all to minimize adverse effects on the environment?"

The ground we walk on is a precious, life-sustaining resource. Richter says leading scientists are quite concerned, for example, about how agriculture in Africa has depleted regional soil fertility to the point that economic development of whole nations will suffer unless entire regions adopt drastic improvements in soil management. Since food production, trade and economic growth are increasingly interconnected in today’s world, perhaps it is time for Earth’s inhabitants to cultivate a more global, cooperative perspective on how we manage Earth’s resources as a whole.

"This is an old story writ large of widespread cropping without nutrient recycling, with the result being soil infertility," Richter said. "And agriculture is only part of the reason why soils are so rapidly changing. Expanding cities, industries, mining and transportation systems all impact soil in ways that are far more permanent than cultivation."

"If humanity is to succeed in the coming decades, we must interact much more positively with the great diversity of Earth's soils."

Posted by Rebecca Sato.

Sources:
http://news.duke.edu/2008/01/soilsave.html

http://www2.le.ac.uk/ebulletin/news/press-releases/2000-2009/2008/01/nparticle.2008-01-25.1681228573

New from the DARPA 'Believe It or Not' Factory: Hand-held Fusion Power

2009-07-10T00:08:00-07:00

Sometimes you just couldn't make this stuff up: Mega military masterminds were looking at chip-sized particle accelerators this year with the "Chip-Scale High Energy Atomic Beams" project. The idea was so far ahead of what's actually possible it might as well have been a cyborg unicorn, but that didn't stop three million dollars of (presumably) awesome research in the field of "I don't care if it's normally the size of a building, I want to put it in my phone!"

This was at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, whose entire mission statement is "Think of crazy, cool or literally killer applications." The chip-scale project was an attempt to miniaturize devices that hadn't even been built yet: you might notice that our current fusion projects, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) and the National Ignition Facility (NIF) are currently
a) Extremely cool
b) Several buildings big
c) Not actually working yet

The DARPA version instead made Doc Brown's "Mr Fusion" reactor look like last year's model, optimistically aiming for hand-held fusion power. Very optimistically. Suicidally optimistically, in fact, as the 2010 budget has been released and it seems that either somebody spotted the extreme impossibility of the chip-scale project, or it's already working and the conspiracy nuts are right. Either way, the project is nowhere to be seen.

It might sound utterly insane, but such advanced or eccentric projects are essential for the furthering of science and technology. If we only aimed at things that looked reasonable there would be no such word as "breakthrough." Or electricity. Or penicillin. Advancing far beyond the realm of the reasonable can lead to surprising spin-off technologies, and every once in a while it even gets what it's going for. Not this time (obviously), but anyone analyzing research spending line-by-line simply doesn't get how progress works.

Darpa's handheld fusion reactorhttp://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/07/darpas-handheld-nuclear-fusion-reactor/

Today's Most Popular Posts

2009-07-10T00:06:00-07:00

The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (7/10)

2009-07-10T00:04:00-07:00

All Roads Lead to Chrome OS

When Google announced on April 1, 2004 that it was releasing a webmail product with 2 GB of free storage, many thought it was an April Fools’ joke. On July 8, 2009, the day after Google announced an operating system to compete with Windows, the Gmail announcement looks like the first step in a secret 5-year plan to unseat Microsoft as the world’s most relevant software company.

The Next Hacking Frontier: Your Brain?

Hackers who commandeer your computer are bad enough. Now scientists worry that someday, they’ll try to take over your brain. In the past year, researchers have developed technology that makes it possible to use thoughts to operate a computer, maneuver a wheelchair or even use Twitter — all without lifting a finger. But as neural devices become more complicated — and go wireless — some scientists say the risks of “brain hacking” should be taken seriously.

The Seven Types of Employees You Meet at Best Buy

Have you ever noticed that no matter which Best Buy you go into, you end up seeing the same people working there? That's because there are seven types of people that work at every single Best Buy, with no exceptions.

Desert Rhubarb - The First Plant Shown to Organize its Own Irrigation?

Scientists from the University of Haifa have shown that Desert Rhubarb, has evolved to ensure that it makes more of the limited rainfall in the Negev Desert than other competitor plants.

Amazon River Dated at 11 Million Years Old

A new drilling study has definitively dated the Amazon River at over 11 million years old, and it has held its current form for at least the last 2.4 million years. The Amazon is one of the two longest rivers in the world, and its flood basin is home to one third of all the species on Earth. Discovering the river’s age is a stark reminder of just how ancient and intertwined the Amazonian ecosystem is, including the immensely rich biodiversity which calls it home.

StumbleUpon Users -Unleash the Power!

2009-07-10T00:00:00-07:00

Hey, we know you Stumblers never sleep, so if you have a free moment we would greatly appreciate your reviews of Daily Galaxy posts on science, space, technology and the environment. Our daily Most Popular Posts is a great source for SU content and reviews.

With thanks,

The Daily Galaxy Editorial Team

"The DNA Code" - New Research Shows Life Hardwired in the Universe

2009-07-09T01:00:00-07:00

A recent mathematical analysis says that life as we know it is written into the laws of reality. DNA is built from a set of twenty amino acids - the first ten of those can create simple prebiotic life, and now it seems that those ten are thermodynamically destined to occur wherever they can.

For those unfamiliar with thermodynamics, it's the Big Brother of all energy equations and science itself. You can apply quantum mechanics at certain scales, and Newtonian mechanics work at the right speeds, but if Thermodynamics says something then everyone listens. An energy analysis by Professors Pudritz and Higgs of McMaster University shows that the first ten amino acids are likely to form at relatively low temperatures and pressures, and the calculated odds of formation match the concentrations of these life-chemicals found in meteorite samples.

They also match those in simulations of early Earth, and most critically, those simulations were performed by other people. The implications are staggering: good news for anyone worried about how we're alone, and bad news for anyone who demands some kind of "Designer" to put life together - it seems that physics can assemble the organic jigsaw all by itself, thank you very much, and has probably done so throughout space since the beginning of everything.

The study indicates that you don't need a miracle to arrive at the chemical cocktail for early life, just a decently large asteroid with the right components. That's all. The entire universe could be stuffed with life, from the earliest prebiotic protein-a-likes to fully DNAed descendants. The path from one to the other is long, but we've had thirteen and a half billion years so far and it's happened at least once.

The other ten amino acids aren't as easy to form, but they'll still turn up - and the process of "stepwise evolution" means that once the simpler systems work, they can grab the rarer "epic drops" of more sophisticated chemicals as they occur - kind of a World of Lifecraft except you literally get a life when you play. And once even the most sophisticated structure is part of a replicating organism, there's plenty to go round.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

Humans and Aliens might share DNA roots

Countdown for Superconducting-Plasma Rockets -Star Trek Trumped!

2009-07-09T00:44:00-07:00

Superconducting plasma rockets might sound like something Buck Rogers blasts the Infini-Cruiser into the Nth dimension with, but this isn't throwaway technobabble. It's the result of years of work, and the prototype space engine is currently powering through testing.

The Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) is a form of ion drive. All ion drives are designed for use in space (so we'll still need to set fire to gigantic tanks of propellant to get there), but once there they allow us to use fuel far more efficiently. Instead of relying on chemical reactions to push propellant out of a thruster, imparting an equal and opposite force on the the craft, ion drives magnetically accelerate the particles out the exhaust - so you can get far more thrust from the same mass of fuel, and since you're in (near-Earth) space solar power means you don't need to carry big batteries.

The VASIMR is an upgrade to the ion engine idea, with the latest model using superconducting magnets to massively increase the strength of the magnetic field driving the output without increasing the weight. First stage testing at the Ad Astra Rocket Company has already been completed, with second-staging testing - ramping up the power output by a factor of ten - scheduled for next week.

Getting improved engines off the drawing and into action is essential for mankind's space plans. Reducing the launch mass of any craft yields massive savings in launch costs, making it more likely that more will happen. You know, until we evolve past the stupidity where exploring the universe itself has to be approved by a balance sheet.

Superconducting Plasma Rocket Testing http://spacefellowship.com/2009/07/06/vx-200-demonstrates-superconducting-first-stage-at-full-power/

The Odd Case of "0402+379": A Galaxy With Two Supermassive Black Holes

2009-07-09T00:22:00-07:00

Scientist believe that most galaxies, certainly all the spiral ones, have such supermassive black holes in the center. Several have been observed or inferred by their radiation signatures, polar jets or other massively energetic effects. While the exact mechanics of such singularity-centrality have to be worked out, a simple picture can explain why they should be there. Of all the places in the universe, a galactic core is the most likely place for a vast star to form (and then collapse into a black hole), or for a smaller black hole to consume enough matter to become supermassive.

Once the hole passes a certain size its gravitational attraction will shape the orbits of everything it doesn't eat. It no longer matters if it was exactly at the center before - it's made itself the center now. Does this mean that asymmetric dwarf galaxies or globular clusters will eventually develop their own black hole pivot points? It seems inevitable: all black holes below a certain size evaporate, and above a certain size they just keep growing. Wait long enough and one will turn up. And eat you.

Galaxy 0402+379 is kind of an unimposing name for the greatest unexploded bomb in existence. It doesn't have one supermassive black hole - it has two, and is thought to be the result of a truly massive collision between two galaxies, each with only the standard "one mega-ultra-huge black hole per galaxy". A galactic collision is the second most amazingly violent event you can think of - the first will be when those two black holes eventually hit each other. The resulting merger will release energy on an utterly unprecedented scale, and emit gravity waves which will bend spacetime itself.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI and Greg Taylor, University of New Mexico

Galileo's Mysterious Black Dot: Notebooks May Reveal His Discovery of New Planet

2009-07-09T00:19:00-07:00

Galileo knew he had discovered a new planet in 1613, 234 years before Neptune's official discovery date, according to a new theory by David Jamieson, Head of the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne. Jamieson is investigating the notebooks of Galileo from 400 years ago and believes that buried in the notations is a mysterious black dot -evidence, it is believed, that he discovered a new planet that we now know as Neptune -the first such discovery of a planet since the ancient Greeks.

The astronomer's championing of Copernicanism, when a large majority of philosophers and astronomers still subscribed to the geocentric view that the Earth remained motionless at the center of the universe. led to his trial by the Inquisition. He was found "vehemently suspect of heresy," forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Galileo was observing the moons of Jupiter in the years 1612 and 1613 and recorded his observations in his notebooks. Over several nights he also recorded the position of a nearby star which does not appear in any modern star catalog.

"It has been known for several decades that this unknown star was actually the planet Neptune. Computer simulations show the precision of his observations revealing that Neptune would have looked just like a faint star almost exactly where Galileo observed it," Professor Jamieson says.

"But a planet is different to a star because planets orbit the Sun and move through the sky relative to the stars. It is remarkable that on the night of January 28 in 1613 Galileo noted that the "star" we now know is the planet Neptune appeared to have moved relative to an actual nearby star."

There is also a mysterious unlabeled black dot in his earlier observations of January 6, 1613, which is in the right position to be Neptune. "I believe this dot could reveal he went back in his notes to record where he saw Neptune earlier when it was even closer to Jupiter but had not previously attracted his attention because of its unremarkable star-like appearance."

If the mysterious black dot on January 6 was actually recorded on January 28, Professor Jamieson proposes this would prove that Galileo believed he may have discovered a new planet.

By using the expertise of trace element analysts from the University of Florence, who have previously analyzed inks in Galileo's manuscripts, dating the unlabelled dot in his notebook may be possible. This analysis may be conducted in October this year.

"Galileo may indeed have formed the hypothesis that he had seen a new planet which had moved right across the field of view during his observations of Jupiter over the month of January 1613," Professor Jamieson says. "If this is correct Galileo observed Neptune 234 years before its official discovery."

Posted by Jason McManus. Adapted and edited from materials provided by the University of Melbourne.

“Longevity Genes” -Research Reveals Why Some Live Longer

2009-07-09T00:18:00-07:00

Scientists have long been baffled as to why some people live so much longer than others. Diet and exercise account for some of it, but researchers have found that genetics also factor heavily into the equation, and that long life is somewhat hereditary as it is with living bristlecone pine that were alive when Caesar ruled Rome.

However, centenarians are known to have just as many—and sometimes even more—harmful gene variants compared with those who die much younger. So what is the secret advantage? That’s a question the experts have been eager to find an answer to.

Scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have finally unlocked the secret behind the paradox. They were able to identify specific favorable “longevity genes” that offer protection from the harmful effects of “bad genes”. The discovery could lead to new drugs that protect against age related diseases.

“We hypothesized that people living to 100 and beyond must be buffered by genes that interact with disease-causing genes to negate their effects,” says Dr. Aviv Bergman, a professor in the departments of pathology and neuroscience at Einstein and senior author of the study, which appears in the August 31 issue of PLoS Computational Biology.

To test the hypothesis, Dr. Bergman and his colleagues examined individuals enrolled in Einstein’s Longevity Genes Project, initiated in 1998 to investigate longevity genes in a selected population: Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews. They are descended from a founder group of just 30,000 or so people. So they are relatively genetically homogeneous, which makes it easier to associate traits (in this case, age-related diseases and longevity) with the genes that determine them.

Participating in the study were 305 Ashkenazi Jews more than 95 years old and a control group of 408 unrelated Ashkenazi Jews. (Centenarians are so rare in any human population—only one in 10,000 people live to be 100—that “longevity” genes probably wouldn’t turn up in a typical control group.)

All participants were grouped into cohorts representing each decade of lifespan from the 50’s on up. Using DNA samples, the researchers determined the prevalence in each cohort of 66 genetic markers present in 36 genes associated with aging.

As expected, some disease-related gene variants were as prevalent or even more prevalent in the oldest cohorts of Ashkenazi Jews than in the younger ones. And as Dr. Bergman had predicted, genes associated with longevity also became more common in each succeeding cohort.

“These results indicate that the frequency of deleterious genotypes may increase among people who live to extremely old ages because their protective genes allow these disease-related genes to accumulate,” says Dr. Bergman.

The Einstein researchers were able to construct a network of gene interactions that contributes to the understanding of longevity. In particular, they found that the favorable variant of the gene CETP acts to buffer the harmful effects of the disease-causing gene Lp(a).

If future research confirms that a single longevity gene can buffers against multiple disease-causing genes, then drugs that mimic the action of the gene could protect against a variety of cardiovascular disease and other age-related ailments.

Posted by Rebecca Sato

Related Galaxy posts:

Can Humans Live to 1,000? Some Experts Claim We Can — Others Want to Prevent That
Video: Aubrey de Grey -Defeat of Aging

Links:

http://www.aecom.yu.edu/home/news/PRdetails.asp?isPR=1&id=372

http://vinnysa1store.blogspot.com/2007/08/einstein-researchers-use-novel-approach.html

"District 9" Summer SciFi Hit (VIDEO): The Social and Geo-political Repercussions of an Alien Landing

2009-07-09T00:08:00-07:00

District 9," filmed in a quasi-documentary style, the $30-million special-effects-heavy film from newcomer Neill Blomkamp, produced by genre-master Peter Jackson, follows the social and geo-political repercussions of aliens crash-landing in Johannesburg where they are sequestered in an apartheid-style homeland, treated like refugees and forced to work for humans. They soon find a kindred spirit in a government agent that is exposed to their biotechnology.

After 48 seconds of documentary-style interviews with people expressing concerns about recent immigrants, District 9 zooms into high gear with a spaceship crash landing impact. An alien interrogation ensues, but by then an intriguing framework sells the idea that this won’t be your ordinary special-effects-crazed thriller. The concept for this movie is unique. In a world where aliens existed the first thing a government would need to do to manage their existence, with regulations and restrictions, curfews, news of where you can and can't go.

"District 9" producer Peter Jackson took pains to explain to the LA Times that "It's a unique take on the science-fiction genre," he said. "It has dramatized sequences and uses home movie clips. But it's not like 'Cloverfield.' It doesn't remind you of anyone else's movie."

The movie's off-line promotions employ signage that deliberately echoes "Whites only" placards once seen in the South as well as cultural touchstones from Blomkamp's upbringing in apartheid-era South Africa. "Warning: Restricted area for humans only," reads an ad painted on a New York City wall.

D-9.com serves as a primer to the self-contained world of "District 9," detailing security guidelines for humans and "non-humans."

Posted by Casey Kazan.

SciFi Greats Ask: Do We Live in a Biological Universe?
Stanley Kubrick on the Mythology of Extraterrestrial Life -A Galaxy Classic

Source:

District 9 Website

District 9 Twitter

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-et-district19-2009jun19,0,1836376.story?track=rss

Today's Most Popular Posts

2009-07-09T00:06:00-07:00

The Daily Flash -Eco, Space, Tech (7/9)

2009-07-09T00:04:00-07:00

New “Face the G8″ Game from World Wildlife Fund

World Wildlife Fund International has an interactive online game up called Face the G8 and it asks the questions “What would you do if you were a member of the G8? Would you choose the right policies that lead us to an environmentally sustainable future, or make the same old empty promises and continue with ‘business as usual’?”

Rapid Thinning of Arctic Ice

The amount of thick, long-lived sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean has declined dramatically in the last six years, with ice thinning by an average of 2.2 feet from 2003 to 2008, according to a study by scientists from NASA and two universities.

Google Announces PC Operating System to Compete with Windows

Google is releasing a lightweight, open-source PC-operating system later this year, the company announced Tuesday night, a move that threatens the very heart of Microsoft, long seen as Google’s biggest rival. Chrome OS is intended to be a very lightweight, quick-starting operating system whose central focus is supporting Google’s Chrome browser. Applications will run mostly inside the browser, making the web — not the desktop — into the computer’s default operating system.

Best Summer Movie Trailers of 2009

Like movie making itself, crafting the perfect summer movie trailer is an art. It takes genuine talent to transport viewers from an idle curiosity to “I must see this movie” mode in three minutes or less.

TwittAround

TwittAround is a terrifying new iPhone application which will actually overlay tweets on the world around you. It is an Augmented Reality Twitter Viewer which uses the iPhone 3GS’ location services to pinpoint your position and then queries the built-in compass to see which way you are looking.

Galaxy Fans- Let Your Clicks Do Some Good

2009-07-09T00:00:00-07:00

Our major brand advertisers at the top of the page and on the right pay the bills that let us deliver great daily news on the discoveries, people and events changing the planet.

Please give our advertisers your support -click on the ads, and enjoy the site.

We donate 10% of our ad revenue to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) for their efforts to help save the planet's endangered species.

With thanks...The Editorial Team

New Space Observations: Early Forms of Inorganic Extraterrestrial Life?

2009-07-08T01:00:00-07:00

An international research team announced a breakthrough in self-replicating plasma crystals which could be an early form of inorganic life. New studies of dust that form lifelike structures suggest that extraterrestrial life may not be carbon-based at all. Researchers at the Russian Academy of Science, the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, and the University of Sydney observed particles of inorganic dust form helical structures and go through other "lifelike" changes.

If you think that's the plot of a movie with a special effects budget and an extremely expendable cast of extras, congratulations, you just thought of something far more likely than what they claim.

The experiments took place under simulated plasma conditions, representative of space and also the primordial Earth. These inorganic structures the team suggests may have even led to the organic molecules of life that we're familiar with, and made from. From the Institute of Physics press release:

So, the big question: could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive? "These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter," says (V.N.) Tsytovich, "they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve".

While there's no convincing argument restricting life to "gooey squidgy stuff", we're afraid this result has much more to do with advertising than actual science. The core of their argument appears to be that certain helical structures which form in a plasma resemble the helices of DNA - anyone familiar with magnetic fields, or indeed the very idea of "one thing looking like another thing", will realize that a helical shape does not a lifeform make. It's an excellent attempt to garner attention for a moderately interesting (if extremely specific) set of calculations, but that's all.

The other half of the inorganic life argument is that the helices "self-replicate" - specifically, they'll "replicate" if another suitable site for the formation of a helix is right next to an existing helix. You might notice that that isn't self-replication. It's just making another helix, so the whole things like claiming clouds are water-based lifeforms because once one appears you often get a bunch more.

The worst weakness is that most of their pretty pictures (and make no mistake, this is a "Pretty Picture Paper") are only computer simulations. Simulation is an essential tool in modern research, but you can't move ahead based only on what the model tells you. If you're claiming that certain plasma columns can move around and replicate, you'd best actually see some of them before claiming that one of the ten million results you can get out of an adjustable model is particularly good-looking and therefore science.

It's great to see scientists increasing their understanding of PR - but not at the expense of accurate reporting.

Posted by Luke McKinney

http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1367-2630/9/8/263/njp7_8_263.html

Photographic Memory In A Pill? New Study Finds Way to Boost Visual Memory

2009-07-08T00:52:00-07:00

The most interesting upgrades aren't for your computer, your car, or even the internet - they're for you. We've always tinkered with our own thought processes (using crude equipment like "alcohol" and "regular exercise") but now mankind has the tools and time to tune the system directly, and one team of scientists may make yellow sticky notes obsolete: they've found a way to boost visual memory.

A team of scientists at the Spanish University of Malaga were working with rat brains, because of the combination of ethics and wimpiness that prevents human trials. They found that a particular protein (RGS-14) boosted a region of the brain known as the "V2 secondary visual cortex", which makes rats sound significantly more like Terminators than you previously thought. (Nightmares resulting from that image are not our responsibility).

Increasing the levels of this protein upgraded the rats visual memory allowing them to remember things for fifteen hundred times longer than normal (two months instead of an hour). The interesting aspect is that this upgrade isn't a new property, but a re-routing of existing processes - the protein seems to cause the formation of long term memories instead of short term, gifting the rat with what could be a photographic visual memory. Which, considering that these are actual lab rats with needles being jabbed into their brains, probably sucks quite a lot. The team also found that destruction of the V2 region utterly eliminated all visual memory of the past - which you can view as research, cruel, or gifting the the rats with a Zen state that takes decades of meditation to achieve.

The potential applications are obvious, and enormous, but beware the hidden downsides - the human brain is the most incredibly sophisticated system ever even conceived of and any tinkering can have huge side effects. This doesn't mean don't do anything (we'd still be in caves otherwise), but be aware that you can't say "IF this THEN that" where neural networks are concerned. Intelligence-upgrades are an inevitable field, already in progress with prototype products like piracetam and caffeine, so it's time to make up your mind if you're going to make your own mind.

Luke McKinney

http://io9.com/5306489/a-drug-that-could-give-you-perfect-visual-memory
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/325/5936/87

Stars Zipping at One-Million MPH in Milky Way's Halo May Be From Other Galaxies (VIDEO)

2009-07-08T00:28:00-07:00

Interstellar Highway Patrol take note: MIT astronomers announced that stars of a recently discovered type, tagged ultracool subdwarfs, take some pretty wild rides reaching speeds of one million mph as they orbit around the Milky Way, following paths very different from those of typical stars. One of them may actually be a visitor that originated in another galaxy.

The results of new MIT research clarifies the origins of these peculiar, faint stars, and may provide new details on the types of stars the Milky Way has acquired from other galaxies.

Ultracool subdwarfs were first recognized as a unique class of stars in 2003, and are distinguished by their low temperatures and low concentrations of elements other than hydrogen and helium ("subdwarf"). They sit at the bottom end of the size range for stars, and some are so small that they are closer to the planet-like objects called brown dwarfs. Only a few dozen ultracool subdwarfs are known today, as they are both very faint - up to 10,000 times fainter than the Sun - and extremely rare.

Adam Burgasser, associate professor of physics at MIT and lead author of the study, was intrigued by the fast motions of ultracool subdwarfs, which zip past the Sun at astonishing speeds. "Most nearby stars travel more or less in tandem with the Sun tracing circular orbits around the center of the Milky Way once every 250 million years," he explains. The ultracool subdwarfs, on the other hand, appear to pass us by at very high speeds, up to 500 km/s, or over a million miles per hour.

Burgasser's team of astronomers assembled measurements of the positions, distances and motions of roughly two dozen of these rare stars. Robyn Sanderson, co-author and MIT graduate student, then used these measurements to calculate the orbits of the subdwarfs using a numerical code developed to study galaxy collisions. Despite doing similar calculations for other types of low-mass stars, "these orbits were like nothing I'd ever seen before," says Sanderson.

Sanderson's calculations showed an unexpected diversity in the ultracool subdwarf orbits. Some plunge deep into the center of the Milky Way on eccentric, comet-like tracks; others make slow, swooping loops far beyond the Sun's orbit. Unlike the majority of nearby stars, most of the ultracool subdwarfs spend a great deal of time thousands of light-years above or below the disk of the Milky Way.

"Someone living on a planet around one of these subdwarfs would have an incredible nighttime view of a beautiful spiral galaxy - our Milky Way - spread across the sky," Burgasser speculates.

Sanderson's orbit calculations confirm that all of the ultracool subdwarfs are part of the Milky Way's halo, a widely dispersed population of stars that likely formed in the Milky Way's distant past. However, one of the subdwarfs, a star named 2MASS 1227-0447 in the constellation Virgo, has an orbit indicating that it might have a very different lineage, possibly extragalactic.

"Our calculations show that this subdwarf travels up to 200,000 light years away from the center of the Galaxy, almost 10 times farther than the Sun," says Bochanski, a postdoctoral researcher in Burgasser's group at MIT. This is farther than many of the Milky Way's nearest galactic neighbors, suggesting that this particular subdwarf may have originated somewhere else.

"Based on the size of its one billion-year orbit and direction of motion, we speculate that 2MASS 1227-0447 might have come from another, smaller galaxy that at some point got too close to the Milky Way and was ripped apart by gravitational forces," explains Bochanksi.

Astronomers have previously identified streams of stars in the Milky Way originating from neighboring galaxies, but all have been distant, massive, red giant stars. The ultracool subdwarf identified by Burgasser and his team is the first nearby, low-mass star to be found on such a trajectory. "If we can identify what stream this star is associated with, or which dwarf galaxy it came from, we could learn more about the types of stars that have built up the Milky Way's halo over the past 10 billion years," says Burgasser.

Casey Kazan, edited and adapted from material provided by the MIT News Office.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/wild-rides-0609.html

Can Ancient Fossils Predict Future Climate Change?

2009-07-08T00:12:00-07:00

The first comprehensive reconstruction of an extreme warm period shows the sensitivity of the climate system to changes in carbon dioxide (CO2) levels as well as the strong influence of ocean temperatures, heat transport from equatorial regions, and greenhouse gases on Earth's temperature. Scientists examined fossils from 3.3 to 3.0 million years ago, known as the mid-Pliocene warm period. Research was conducted by the Pliocene Research, Interpretation and Synoptic Mapping (PRISM) group, led by the U.S. Geological Survey.

New data allow for more accurate predictions of future climate and improved understanding of today's warming. Past warm periods provide real data on climate change and are natural laboratories for understanding the global climate system.

Scientists examined fossils from 3.3 to 3.0 million years ago, known as the mid-Pliocene warm period. Research was conducted by the Pliocene Research, Interpretation and Synoptic Mapping (PRISM) group, led by the U.S. Geological Survey.

PRISM's research is the most comprehensive global reconstruction for any warm period and emphasizes the importance of examining the past state of Earth's climate system to understand the future.

The mid-Pliocene experienced the most extreme warming over the past 3.3 million years. Global average temperatures were 2.5°C (4.5°F) greater than today and within the range projected for the 21st century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"Exploring the mid-Pliocene will further understanding on the role of ocean circulation in a warming world, the impacts of altered storm tracks, polar versus tropical sensitivity, and the impacts of altered atmospheric CO2 and oceanic energy transport systems," said USGS scientist Harry Dowsett, also lead scientist for PRISM. "We used fossils dated to the mid-Pliocene to reconstruct sea surface and deepwater ocean temperatures, and will continue research by studying specific geographic areas, vegetation, sea ice extent and other environmental characteristics during the Pliocene."

Since CO2 levels during the mid-Pliocene were only slightly higher than today's levels, PRISM research suggests that a slight increase in our current CO2 level could have a large impact on temperature change. Research also shows warming of as much as 18°C, bringing temperatures from -2°C to 16°C, in the high latitudes of the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans during the mid-Pliocene. Warming in the Pacific, similar to a present day El Niño, was a characteristic of the mid-Pliocene. Global sea surface and deep water temperatures were found to be warmer than those of today, impacting the ocean's circulation system and climate. Data suggest the likely cause of mid-Pliocene warmth was a combination of several factors, including increased heat transport from equatorial regions to the poles and increased greenhouse gases.

PRISM has been chosen by the Pliocene Model Intercomparison Project of Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project Phase II as the dataset against which to run and test the performance of climate models for the Pliocene.

PRISM's primary collaborators are Columbia University, Duke University, the University of Leeds and the British Antarctic Survey.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Is Global Warming Part of Earth's Natural Cycle: MIT Team Says "Yes"
Global-Warming Tipping Point: 9 Degrees Temperature Increase Would Devastate Earth's Population
Life at the Edge: Why are the Planet's Coral Reefs Dying?
Climate-Change Skeptics Proved Wrong (Again): Sun Nixed As Cause

Will Earth Become a Planet Without Ice Caps?

For more information and to view the compiled data, visit http://geology.er.usgs.gov/eespteam/prism/index.html.
Adapted from materials provided by United States Geological Survey.

Today's Most Popular Posts

2009-07-08T00:10:00-07:00