As I was stuffing my face today, I wondered if the Universe cared. The short answer is no. The slightly longer and more depressing answer is: my existence is more marginal than a speck of stray DNA on a grain of sand staring at vast oceans (that's literally true, oh the irony...). Clearly, there's no point to existence except amusement. So, here's some:

On average, each of us human beings from birth till death consume about (2000 per day x 365 days x 70 years) calories. That is a pretty big number (51,100,000 calories).Big, of course, is a relative term. The big calories translates to about 0.00002 milligrams of matter. In the scheme of things--compared to, say, the amount of matter Sun converts to pure energy per second--, the amout of matter we manage to process in 70 years is stupefyingly underwhelming. Sun converts about 4,000,000,000 kilograms of mass to pure energy every second compared to our biological knickers-in-knots process*. Still, we are here and we can point a resounding finger at the Sun. That's quite something, isn't it? Life is an extraordinarily strange and fragile business whichever way you look at it (the strangeness includes the looking-at-it part too). Perhaps, in a thousand years, we may climb up the energy ladder, sit alongside stars and have a proper material breakfast of a few hundred tons of hydrogen. It would be way more amusing than what we do with the less-than-nothing we consume today. Of course, we've got to survive to do that.

*The comparison is sort of fudged. Sun does atom crushing, we don't do that. Sun literally converts the mass to energy. OTOH, we do a lot of very very minute electrochemical energy extraction. The comparison aims to show the scale of energies involved, which differ by orders of magnitude. Physics savvy readers please pitch in and clarify my muddle if needed. Read the comments on this post...

Seriously! Go have a look.

It seems my book The Monty Hall Problem: The Remarkable Story of Math's Most Contentious Brainteaser made the list! And to think I wasn't planning to do a blog post today.

Browsing through the other entries, it looks like my reading list just got a bit longer. (Of course, they will have to get in line behind Stephen King's forthcoming magnum opus, coming out on Tuesday. But that's a different post...)

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A bit of follow-up on the two experiments we described last week:

First off, the water cycle model.

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Divining sticks that consist essentially of an antenna not even attached to a radio (which might make it slihgtly useful for listening to music and stuff), and costing between 16 and 60 THOUSAND DOLLARS each, are being used as the main technology for detecting bombs at check points staffed by the Iraqi army.

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Here's a question which pretty much everyone gets wrong. But the readers of this blog aren't just a random sample, so I bet most of you will get it right:

Two identical vehicles A and B, both traveling at speed V directly toward the other vehicle, collide exactly head-on. At another test track, car C collides with an indestructible concrete barrier at speed V'. All other things being equal, the crash-test dummy occupants of vehicles A, B, and C will experience the same forces (and therefore injuries) if...

1. V' = V/2
2. V' = V
3. V' = 2V
4. Something else (explain)

How might the answer change if the A and B do not have equal masses?

I'll let my astute readers answer, but I'll give a place to start for those who want to make sure they're thinking from a physics perspective. Momentum is mass times velocity. Force is the time rate of change of momentum. Go from there. Also, in this case I have to suggest you not try to find the answer experimentally!

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A puppet commenter informs me that El Naschie is suing Nature. El Naschie, you may remember, was the journal editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals who was accused of not reviewing his own papers in the journal. To be expected, I suppose. But the commenter that pointed this out is entertaining:Sarah Limbrick [Pontiff: writer of the above linked article about the suit] would surely be interested to know what the leading libel expert in England had to say about the Nature article complained of. He said he is in a state of disbelief that the worlds most respectable scientific journal Nature should publish an article which bears all the hallmarks of the tabloid press. Another interesting point is the conspiracy theory linking the plagiarism of El Naschies work published in Scientific American with the Nature article as well as a far worse article published in Die Zeit. Interestingly all of these three publications are owned by Macmillan. I understand from confidential sources that a mega surprise will be released at the trial engulfing highly reputed names some of whom are Nobel laureates.OOooh, Nobel laureates in a libel case and conspiracy theories to boot! That's bigger than the Scopes monkey trial!

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It's hard to believe that until 1929, we were pretty sure that the Universe consisted entirely of our galaxy, and everything else was inside of us.

Hard to believe that you can look at something like this and not think it was another galaxy like our own, isn't it?

Yet when you look in the visible light -- which is all they knew how to do back then -- this is what the pinwheel galaxy (above) looks like through a modern advanced amateur telescope.

Is it really so clear to your naked eye that this image is so different from the one below?

Believe it or not, this image is of a planetary nebula, or just the gas blown off by a single star as it dies and collapses into a white dwarf. It isn't obvious to me that they should have known back then that these "spiral nebulae" are so different from planetary nebulae. Take a look at another spectacular one...

...and maybe a few more general ones.

Yup, they're all just dying stars that form planetary nebulae, and they're all within our own galaxy. Why couldn't the spiral ones be in there too? Thankfully, we've learned a lot more, and our observing abilities simply dwarf what they were 80 years ago. Take a look at today's Astronomy Picture of the Day, and see if you can't tell instantly what's a planetary nebula and what's a galaxy.

But without the full power of what we have today, it isn't obvious without doing some serious astronomical analysis, like measuring individual stars in these nebulae, which is what Hubble had to do. So enjoy the nearby planetary nebulae and the distant spiral nebulae, and enjoy the fact that we don't have to get them confused anymore. (And, it's always nice to give you some pretty pictures to look at on a Friday.)

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It seems like I've been stepping on a lot of people's toes lately, so in an effort to foster more camaraderie and less belligerence between the "old media" (this is not derogatory, but rather refers to anything pre-internet news source or classic journalistic source) and "new media" (this includes internet-era news sources, bloggers and the like), I'd like to put down my thoughts on the state of science journalism on the internet today.

1. I do not think all media is bad at science. There are a multitude of great science sources out there that handle the issues quite well, mostly associated with professional societies like AGU or APS or through more popular-slanted journals like Science or Nature.
2. I do think that science journalism (not science writing) is vital in news media and bloggers cannot fully replace - heck, I don't have time to track down and talk to all the players regarding a specific issue and that is where science journalists earn their bucks.
3. That being said, if you just look at an aggregator like Google News and look up a current interesting science topic, you'll find that a vast majority of sources are just not very good. Sure, there are the Live Sciences of the internet that handle the material well, but on the whole, there is a lot of misinformation being disseminated.
4. In my opinion, the problem is that many of these news sources are second-, third- or more-handing the news rather than looking at the primary source. This is because (a) they might not have anyone that can understand it; (b) they don't have the time to do it or (c) they don't care.
5. I also think that many media sources will look for the "hook" before looking for the real ramifications - this is the "eyes" problem with internet news: you need to get people's attention and fast. It started in TV news, with sensationalist coverage (Al Capone's vault anyone?) and the internet has embraced the format.
6. I also think the rampant antiscience sentiment in a lot of the US, combined with a lack of proper science education has promoted a generation (or more) that either (a) doesn't care about science and/or (b) doesn't understand enough to question some of these questionable sources.

So, how do we solve this?

1. We need to make science fascinating again. It has become so myopic in many fields - mostly thanks to the current academic structure to publish or perish. People are interested in science, just maybe not the Nd isotopes of minerals found in a specific hydrothermal pool in upper Mongolia.


2. We need our new Carl Sagans, Arthur C. Clarkes or Stephen Goulds - people who understand science and can advocate for it. I have trouble thinking of anyone filling those roles anymore.


3. We need to strength science education at all levels - and I'm not talking about standardized tests. I'm talking about teaching the scientific method and making people want to think about science and how it is done. That is what makes people interested, not memorizing the formulas for 100 minerals, but rather how they form and what that can tell us about the Earth. Science should be a hands-on event that fosters thinking rather than memorization - the current educational system in the US emphasizes the later thanks to the love of testing we now have.


4. We need people who understand science and have been trained to become journalists. I hate to say it, but maybe we don't need another 1,000 science Ph.D.s trying to become professors, but rather they should try to bring their love of science to the public through journalism and writing.

I think that covers a lot of what I think about the state of science journalism on and off the internet. I think the real problem is likely the deeper, societal anti-science sentiment that doesn't foster scientific thought. I also think that we've taken a lot of the wonder out of science - that sort of Victorian mentality that anything is worth pursuing because it might be interesting. The business model that only science that will have a practical end result or that will have a successful outcome has neutered a lot of the ingenuity of science. Science is about looking at the universe and thinking "this is amazing, how does it work?" and somehow we need to get back to that both in science as a discipline and society as a whole.

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As you know you can see everyone who's registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what.

Sol Lederman is the Consultant for US Dept of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and a blogger. He also tweets for the Department. I interviewed Sol earlier this year, after his session at ScienceOnline'09. At the next conference, Sol will lead a workshop "Make your own social networking site with Drupal".

Chris Nicolini is the Web Producer and Editor for the American Institute of Physics and runs (and tweets for) InsideScience.org.

Lenore Ramm works at Duke Center for Instructional Technology, is an artist and a food blogger and a twitterer.

Tyler Dukes is a Web producer at News 14 Carolina and a freelance journalist in Raleigh, NC. He blogs on -30- and is on Twitter.

Ryan Somma is a software developer, works in USCG Aviation Logistics Center and is an amateur scientist at Port Discover Science Center in Elizabeth City on the coast of North Carolina. He blogs on Ideonexus and is also on Twitter.

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Today's Quantum Optics lecture is about quantum computing experiments, and how different types of systems stack up. Quantum computing, as you probably know if you're reading this blog, is based on building a computer whose "bits" can not only take on "0" and "1" states, but arbitrary superpositions of "0" and "1". Such a computer would be able to out-perform any classical computer on certain types of problems, and would open the exciting possibility of a windows installation that is both working and hung up at the same time.

There are roughly as many types of proposed quantum computers as there are people working on quantum computation. It's not clear which of them, if any, will eventually prove to be useful, meaning that this is the perfect subject for a blog poll:

The quantum computers of the future will be based on:(survey)

While this is a poll about quantum computing, the machines running the poll are strictly classical, so you can only choose one option.

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Piton de la Fournaise erupting on November 5, 2009. Image by Julian Balboni in Clicanoo.

Eruptions reader Richard Oliver pointed out to me that Piton de la Fournaise on Reunion Island erupted (in french) on Thursday night. The volcano produced at least two lava flows that reached the ocean flowed downslope to ~1970 m above sea level, but by Friday morning, the seismicity and eruptive activity had waned considerably. Local residents of the island went out at night to see (in french) the lava flows, with the typical words of warning from local officials. The timeline for the eruption (in french) looks like this (all local time):

20:50 - An eruption begins in the south cliff inside the Dolomieu crater
21:05 - The crack extends and opens on the southern flank near the edge of the Dolomieu crater
21:20 - A second crack opened on the eastern slope of the cone summit of the Piton de la Fournaise (Marco crater).

By the middle of the night, two lava flows were visible on the flanks of the volcano. However, new reports say that by 9:00 on Friday morning, the harmonic tremors at Piton had returned to normal. Yesterday (Thursday) morning, the volcano did experience a M3 earthquake (in french), ~12 hours before it started to erupt, suggesting that this seismicity might have triggered the eruption (or the earthquake was a result of the eruption process - a bit of chicken and egg). However, the volcano had been inflating over the past few weeks, so it seems that an eruption was becoming more likely. This is the first eruption at Piton de la Fournaise since January of this year.

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Ed has already given the lowdown on a new study in Nature which might lead to a rethink on earthquake hazards in the continental interior. Plate tectonics treats plates as entirely rigid entities, but continental crust is too weak, and too riddled with faults left over from when it was close to a plate boundary, for it to entirely hold up when subjected to the stresses of plate motion. So although a very large proportion of the Earth's earthquakes occur at plate boundaries, there is also some seismicity - including some very large shocks - within plate interiors. The problem is working out where this intraplate deformation is going to occur, and to do so seismologists rely on data which serve them well at plate boundaries - the historical record of large earthquakes, and the location of low-level seismic activity which indicates the build up of tectonic strain.

What Stein and Liu argue in their paper is that away from the plate boundaries, these tools provide a very misleading picture. In apparently active parts of the continental interior like the New Madrid area, all the abnormal seismicity can be regarded as a long-lived aftershock sequence; rather than indicating any new elastic strain being built up by external forces, which could eventually produce another large earthquake in the future, the seismicity is just a local tectonic response to a historically recent large earthquake (in New Madrid's case, it was a series of magnitude 7-8 earthquakes in late 1811 and early 1812), and will eventually die off with time.

This conclusion is a little worrying, since it implies that the next big intra-continental quake might well occur in what presently seems to be a seismically inactive region, which, given the density of old faults cutting through your typical chunk of continental crust, could be almost anywhere. We already know the difficulties of predicting when big earthquakes are going to occur, but it seems that in the middle of plates, predicting where they are going to happen might also be a bit more tricky than we thought. However, a caveat remains: the proposed length of a typical intra-continental aftershock sequence is hundreds of years, which is much longer than our instrumental records, and even historical records in many places. The authors do point out that earthquake patterns in China, which has the best historical record, is of single large quakes in different areas (with last year's Sichuan quake being the most recent) rather than a series of large earthquakes associated with a particular fault; perhaps palaeoseimology can show whether a similar pattern holds further back in time and on other continents.

Stein, S., & Liu, M. (2009). Long aftershock sequences within continents and implications for earthquake hazard assessment Nature, 462 (7269), 87-89 DOI: 10.1038/nature08502

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Last time, we talked about the discovery of dark energy. How did it happen? Well, there are certain kinds of Supernovae, type Ia supernovae, that are practically identical to one another all across the Universe. In fact, we had one happen in our own galaxy in 1572; it outshone everything besides the Moon in the night sky for weeks.

How do type Ia supernovae work? Many solar systems out there are like our own, with one star dominating the system. Others, however, have two or more stars present in the system. Stars up to about four times the mass of our Sun, when they finish burning their nuclear fuel (we've got between 5 and 7 billion years to go for that), have their cores collapse down to white dwarfs. A white dwarf is a super dense object -- about 100 million times denser than Earth -- having a mass comparable to the Sun, but only the physical size of Earth. When there's a companion star nearby, however, the white dwarf can start stealing some of the mass. When the total mass of the star exceeds about 1.4 times the mass of our Sun, the atoms in the center become unstable, and the whole star explods in a type Ia supernova!

This happens all over the Universe, as the first white dwarfs formed when the Universe was just 150 million years old (barely 1% of its present age). These type Ia supernovae, as far as we can tell, go off regularly for the entire rest of the Universe, up until the present day. In fact, we've even found the binary companion that gave rise to the 1572 supernova!

The two things that make type Ia supernovae special? First off, they're the same at all times. Just like hydrogen atoms are the same everywhere in the Universe, whether it's 200 million years old or 13 billion years old, so it is with type Ia supernovae! In other words, if we see a type Ia supernova, we know that it formed from a white dwarf star tipping past the mass limit. Hence, they should be the same regardless of when in time they occur.

But second, and perhaps more importantly, when we measure the light from a type Ia supernova, we can immediately figure out how intrinsically bright it was, and therefore how far away it is. All you have to do is measure the shape of the light curve, and match it with well-known ones:

And that's why, when we see these supernovae, we can learn how far away they are. Combine that with a simple redshift measurement, and you can distinguish between a Universe with dark energy and one without it. The data are overwhelming (the one with a 'lambda' in it has dark energy):

And it was this analysis that led us to first accept dark energy as a probable component of the Universe. But once this came out at the end of the 1990s, there were a flurry of alternative explanations that came with it, and a lot of skepticism. Come back for part 3 to learn about it!

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A long time ago, a massive star about 10,000 light years from Earth went kaboom.
329 years ago, we think, in 1680, the light from the supernova explosion reached Earth and was recorded as a new star by the Flamsteed, then the Astronomer Royal, looking relatively dim as nearby supernove go, due to the layers of dust in the galaxy between us and the site of the explosion.

Now, digging into archival x-ray data, a couple of astronomers may finally have figured out what is going on in Cass A.

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Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Last week, at the imagine science film festival in New York, Magnetic Movie won the Nature Scientific Merit Award:

In 2009, the Nature Scientific Merit Award went to the film judged to be not only the most deserving but also the most scientifically accurate, Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhard's Magnetic Movie.

I love Magnetic Movie, too - but what think you about the scientific accuracy angle? See what I had to say about it in my Art vs. Science series, earlier this year:

Art vs. Science, Part One: Semiconductor

Art vs. Science, Part Two: You want raw data? You can't handle raw data!

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The latest of volcano news from around the world, brought to you by the USGS and Smithsonian Institute Global Volcanism Program (and especially Sally Kuhn Sennert!)

Highlights this week include:

• Karangetang in Indonesia produced a couple 3 km/10,000 foot steam-and-ash plumes according to reports from pilots.
• Soufriere Hills on the island on Montserrat has had quite a few pyroclastic flows over the last few weeks since the volcano started erupting again. Mix that with some heavy rainfall and lahars were produced as well.
• The alert level is still at Orange at Karymsky in Kamchatka, which produced a number of ~3.7 km/12,100 foot ash plumes.
• Lava flows from the Thanksgiving Eve Breakout at Kilauea continued to flow towards the ocean, while the Halema'uma'u vent continued to steam from the lava pond near the surface at the vent. The NASA Earth Observatory posted an image today of the current Kilauea lava flows.
• The alert level at Anak Krakatau in Indonesia were lowered this week, back to 2 (out of 4) after both seismicity and plumes have tailed off since August.
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Science Scout Twitter Feed
Well, actually, mathematicians - but it would probably go like this:

CD Title: Inverse: (Special limited edition release) (2009) Artist: VAMPIRE WEEKEND Rating: 2.718 stars (out of 5) - - -

The rating stands. (Spoiler alert: We rounded.) Actually, we took our cue here from Leonard Euler. Our rating is actually "e," as in the sound of the squeals that will inevitably emanate from the ladies of Cambridge after they all get a hold of Inverse come two months. Yes, M.I.T.'s finest are back with a shtick to shake up the innumerate masses for whom any further mention of the band's album sales sends us critics to sleep, and more than a few of the recent graduates of that other school up the river into jealous fits.

Anyway, you can read the rest here at the SCQ.

p.s. Horchata rocks! And this review is entirely fictional.

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Another one of the fundamental properties of a chaotic system is dense periodic orbits. It's a bit of an odd one: a chaotic system doesn't have to have periodic orbits at all. But if it does, then they have to be dense.

The dense periodic orbit rule is, in many ways, very similar to the sensitivity to initial conditions. But personally, I find it rather more interesting a way of describing key concept. The idea is, when you've got a dense periodic orbit, it's an odd thing. It's a repeating system, which will cycle through the same behavior, over and over again. But when you look at a state of the system, you can't tell which fixed path it's on. In fact, miniscule differences in the position, differences so small that you can't measure them, can put you onto dramatically different paths. There's the similarity with the initial conditions rule: you've got the same basic idea of tiny changes producing dramatic results.

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Boom 'n' Doom: Volcanoes, North Carolina and North Carolina Volcanoes

November 18th; Acro Café on the fourth floor of the Museum of Natural Sciences

8:30-10:00 am with discussion beginning at 9:00 followed by Q&A

Volcanic activity half a world away can affect us in our own state. When Indonesia's Mount Tambora erupted over about 4 days in 1815, the resulting debris cloud led to the "Year Without Summer" in 1816, which was marked by massive crop failures from Europe to North Carolina. Join in a discussion of recent and historical world-wide volcanic events, and find out about old North Carolina volcanoes. Learn about the new Mineral Spectroscopy Laboratory and how Museum research is helping understand and ameliorate the effects of large scale volcanic eruptions.

About the Speaker: Dr. Chris Tacker has been the Research Curator in Geology for the Museum of Natural Sciences since 1996. His work involves mineralogy and its application to understanding geologic processes, especially those that involve fluids and big explosions. Recently, the National Science Foundation awarded him two grants for mineral spectroscopy. He also writes on North Carolina geology for the general public, and appears on the Museum's PBS program Exploring North Carolina.

RSVP: katey.ahmann@ncdenr.gov; or call 919-733-7450 ext.531

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Lava flows from the 2005 Mando Hararo eruption in Ethiopia.

Alright, I had been attempting to ignore this story because it was, well, a little uninteresting at first, but it apparently has legs so I will tackle it.

Slashdot has a post proclaiming:
'Volcanic activity may split the African continent in two, creating a new ocean, say experts. This is due to a recent geological crack which has appeared in northeastern Ethiopia.'

OK. Where do I start?

This is based on a recent study published in Geophysical Research Lettersthat found that the recent volcanism in Ethiopia is related to the active rifting up and down the east side of the continental - an area already known as the Ethiopian/East African Rift. The continent is known to be pulling apart, forming the valleys and deep lakes (like Lake Malawi and Victoria) that have active volcanoes like Oldoinyo Lengai in them. This is nothing new, we've known that Africa is splitting apart for decades - and the rifting has been going on for millions of years.

From what I can gather from the study, the real find is that the fissures formed during the 2005 eruptions at Mando Hararo in Ethiopia are actually part of that rifting - i.e., the crack is part of the "crack" that is splitting the continent. This is not to say that the rifting is starting NOW due to the crack - rather that the fissure is a new manifestation of the active rifting between Africa and the Arabian subcontinent. As with most fissures in actively rifting area, magma came up the cracks - always nice to have ready-made conduits - so this process of cracking and erupting is akin to what we might expect at a mid-ocean ridge (except, at this point, on a continent).

So yes, at some point in the future, water from likely the Red Sea (also an actively rifting and growing ocean) will spill into the East African Rift system and create a new "ocean." However, this process has been going on for millions of years and to come out and misconstrue the study by Ayele and others in GRL as saying that the activity in 2005 started the rifting or that the crack is the "start" of a new ocean just shows that the mainstream media (a) doesn't know how to read science beyond what other media are saying about it and (b) how quickly the real findings of a study can be lost in the murk of speculation.

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