The 10 Worst U.S Natural Disasters

From Live Science:

Throughout modern history, the failure to prepare and cope with Mother Nature has resulted in catastrophic consequences, from wrecked economies to thousands of lives lost. Even as modern technology improves forecasts, Nature still gets the upper hand every now and then. Considering both human and economic costs, we present 10 of the worst all-time disasters to strike the United States. - Tuan C. Nguyen

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Skeleton May Be Early TB Victim By LiveScience Staff

A close-up of a skeleton dating to A.D. 302 that archaeologists say bears evidence of TB. Credit: Sarah Mitchell/University of York

From Live Science:

The skeleton of a man discovered in a shallow grave on what is now a college campus in England could belong to one of Britain’s earliest victims of tuberculosis.

Radiocarbon dating suggests the man died in the fourth century, around A.D. 302, when Romans ruled the region. He was interred in a shallow scoop in a flexed position, on his right side.

The man, aged 26 to 35 years old, suffered from iron deficiency anemia during childhood and at 5-foot, 4-inches, was shorter than average for Roman males.

The first known case of TB in Britain is from the Iron Age (300 B.C.), but cases in the Roman period are fairly rare, and largely confined to the southern half of England. TB is most frequent from the 12th century A.D. in England when people were living in urban environments. So the skeleton may provide crucial evidence for the origin and development of the disease in this country.

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So Much For Trends Towards Global Warming

Arctic Sea Ice Melt Season Officially Over; Ice Up Over 9% From Last Year -- Watts Up With That

We have news from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). They say: The melt is over. And we’ve added 9.4% ice coverage from this time last year. Though it appears NSIDC is attempting to downplay this in their web page announcement today, one can safely say that despite irrational predictions seen earlier this year, we didn’t reach an “ice free north pole” nor a new record low for sea ice extent.

Here is the current sea ice extent graph from NSIDC as of today, notice the upturn, which has been adding ice now for 5 days:



Here is what they have to say about it:

The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the second-lowest extent recorded since the dawn of the satellite era. While above the record minimum set on September 16, 2007, this year further reinforces the strong negative trend in summertime ice extent observed over the past thirty years. With the minimum behind us, we will continue to analyze ice conditions as we head into the crucial period of the ice growth season during the months to come.

Despite overall cooler summer temperatures, the 2008 minimum extent is only 390,000 square kilometers (150,000 square miles), or 9.4%, more than the record-setting 2007 minimum. The 2008 minimum extent is 15.0% less than the next-lowest minimum extent set in 2005 and 33.1% less than the average minimum extent from 1979 to 2000.

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Why Do We Believe Impossible Things?

From ABC News: Science & Technology

Why do so many people hold beliefs that are clearly false? A recent story on ABCNews.com said 80 million Americans believe we have been visited by aliens from another planet, and numerous studies show that millions of people believe in ghosts, extrasensory perception and, of course, alien abductions.

According to biologist Lewis Wolpert of University College, London, all those beliefs are clearly false, and they all share a common beginning. It may well have started when the first human realized he, or she, could make a fire by rubbing two sticks together.

Wolpert is the author of a new provocative book exploring the evolutionary origins of belief, called "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast." The title comes from Lewis Carroll's classic "Through the Looking Glass," when Alice tells the White Queen that she cannot believe in impossible things.

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Smithsonian To Put Its 137 Million-Object Collection Online

From CNN Science:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Smithsonian Institution will work to digitize its collections to make science, history and cultural artifacts accessible online and dramatically expand its outreach to schools, the museum complex's new chief said Monday.

"I worry about museums becoming less relevant to society," said Secretary G. Wayne Clough in his first interviews since taking the Smithsonian's helm in July.

Clough, 66, who was president of the Georgia Institute of Technology for 14 years, says he's working to bring in video gaming experts and Web gurus to collaborate with curators on creative ways to present artifacts online and make them appealing to kids.

"I think we need to take a major step," Clough said in an earlier interview. "Can we work with outside entities to create a place, for example, where we might demonstrate cutting-edge technologies to use to reach out to school systems all over the country? I think we can do that."

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No Plant CO2 Relief In Warm World

From The BBC:

Plants are unlikely to soak up more carbon dioxide from the air as the planet warms, research suggests.

US scientists found that grassland took up less CO2 than usual for two years following temperatures that are now unusually hot, but may become common.

The conclusion parallels a real-world finding from Europe's 2003 heatwave, when the continent's plant life became a net producer, not absorber, of CO2.

The latest study is published in the scientific journal Nature.

Researchers extracted four intact segments of grassland, about 3 sq m in area and weighing about 12 tonnes each, from the prairies of Oklahoma, and placed them in special chambers at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Reno, Nevada.

Conditions in the chambers, such as temperature, moisture and sunlight, could be precisely controlled.

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Doctors To Study 'Out Of Body' Experiences Of 1,500 Near-Death Heart Attack Patients

A team of doctors will study the 'out of body' experiences of 1,500 heart attack patients

From The Daily Mail:

A team of British and American hospital doctors will study the near-death experiences of 1,500 heart attack patients.

The research into 'out of body' experiences is due to take three years and is being coordinated by Southampton University.

Some people who have nearly died report being able to soar out of their bodies and look down on themselves and medical staff.

Doctors will place images on shelves that are only visible from the ceiling. They will see if the patients can recall the images and analyse their brain activity.

Dr Sam Parnia, an expert in the field of consciousness during clinical death who is heading the study, said: 'If you can demonstrate that consciousness continues after the brain switches off, it allows for the possibility that the consciousness is a separate entity.

'It is unlikely that we will find many cases where this happens, but we have to be open-minded.

'And if no one sees the pictures, it shows these experiences are illusions or false memories. This is a mystery that we can now subject to scientific study.'

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Improving Our Ability To Peek Inside Molecules

Massively parallel holography at high resolutions. (a) A lithographic test sample imaged by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) next to a 30-nm-thick twin-prime 71x73 array with 44-nm square gold scattering elements. The scale bar is 2 mm. (b) The diffraction pattern collected at the ALS (1 x 106 photons in a five second exposure, 200 mm from the sample). (c) The real part of the reconstructed hologram. d) The simulation with 1 x 106 photons. The grey scale represents the real part of the hologram. (e) A simulation with the same number of photons, but a single reference pinhole. (f) Line through the two dots indicated in image (c). (Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 18, 2008) — It's not easy to see a single molecule inside a living cell. Nevertheless, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are helping to develop a new technique that will enable them to create detailed high-resolution images, giving scientists an unprecedented look at the atomic structure of cellular molecules.

The LLNL team is collaborating with scientists across the country and in Germany and Sweden to utilize high-energy X-ray beams, combined with complex algorithms, to overcome difficulties in current technology.

The work began more than five years ago as a Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project, headed by Stefano Marchesini. He has since transferred to Lawrence Berkeley Lab (LBNL), leaving the project in the hands of Stefan Hau-Riege, a materials science physicist at LLNL.

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Dogs Catch Human Yawns

This Hungarian Vizsla is either really sleepy or just spied its owner yawning. Credit: Dreamstime.com.

From Live Science:

Spying someone yawning often makes us yawn. Now, a new study shows your canine buddy can catch yawns from you, too.

The results suggest domestic dogs have the capacity for a fundamental form of empathy, the researchers say.

The phenomenon, called contagious yawning, has been found only in humans and other primates such as chimpanzees and is thought to relate to our ability to empathize with others. Past studies, however, involved yawning within one species at a time, so for instance chimps that triggered other chimps to yawn and humans prompting yawns in other humans.

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Aquaflow Strikes Oil With “Green Crude” From Algae

From Gas 2.0:

Do you remember going to the local pond or lake as a kid and swimming around without a care in the world? Do you remember the feel of the algae between you’re toes? Well if New Zealand company Aquaflow Bionomic has anything to say about it, we may be using that same algae to fuel our vehicles.

The company, founded in 2005, says that it has produced the first samples of green crude oil at a commercially competitive price. This could be great news for a lot of Bio-Fuel “Flip-Floppers.” The question of utilizing land based crops producing Ethanol, or animal / vegetable oil based Bio-diesel, may be coming to a close with this new contender.

Green Crude is made from wild algae grown on human sewage, and as such, would not use valuable acres which could then be used to, say, grow more food instead of fuel.

The company states that Green Crude produces 90 per cent less emissions than regular diesel, and in addition, it produces a great byproduct, clean Water for irrigation or industrial re-use.

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New Oil-Extraction Technology

Petrobanks Capri / Thai Processes For Upgrading And Recovering Oilsands And Heavy Oil -- The Next Big Future

Graphics and information from the Sept 2008 Petrobank investors presentation (48 pages) If the Capri/Thai processes are successful then Canada's oilsands, other oilsands and heavy oil deposits around the world will have higher recovery rates using a more economic process and the oil will be upgrading in the ground to a higher and more valuable quality. This would be the technology that would crush peak oil for several decades and allow an orderly transition to a post oil world. The processes would enable trillions of barrels of oil to be economically accessed. In a few months the Capri process could be proven out and the energy world would be changed. Oil technology would change the world by unlocking the oilsand and heavy oil around the world. Trillions of barrels of oil would become economically feasible. It would be a and game changer. More projects like the one in would go ahead to access 3-4 billion barrels of oil at 120,000 bpd within 5 years.

Petrobank aims to upgrade oilsand bitumen before it ever comes to the surface. Petrobank will soon launch the CAPRI component of its in situ toe-to-heel air injection production technology. Upgrading the oil in the ground avoids the delays and costs associated with building refineries and transporting the bitumen to upgraders.

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Hubble Finds Unidentified Object in Space, Scientists Puzzled

From Gizmodo:

This is exactly why we send astronauts to risk their life to service Hubble: in a paper published last week in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists detail the discovery of a new unidentified object in the middle of nowhere. I don't know about you, but when a research paper conclusion says "We suggest that the transient may be one of a new class" I get a chill of oooh-aaahness down my spine. Especially when after a hundred days of observation, it disappeared from the sky with no explanation. Get your tinfoil hats out, because it gets even weirder.

The object also appeared out of nowhere. It just wasn't there before. In fact, they don't even know where it is exactly located because it didn't behave like anything they know. Apparently, it can't be closer than 130 light-years but it can be as far as 11 billion light-years away. It's not in any known galaxy either. And they have ruled out a supernova too. It's something that they have never encountered before. In other words: they don't have a single clue about where or what the heck this thing is.

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Why People Ignore Hurricane Evacuation Warnings

Boats and debris are piled up Saturday, Sept. 13, 2008 in Galveston, Texas after Hurricane Ike hit the area. AP Photo/David J. Phillip, Pool

From Live Science:

As Hurricane Ike's floodwaters begin to recede from Galveston, Texas, and other areas of the Gulf Coast, emergency responders are surveying the storm's damage and rescuing thousands of residents who ignored evacuation orders.

There are many reasons why some people don't heed evacuation notices — some think they can ride out the winds and surging waters, while others simply have nowhere to go and no way to leave. Still others remember unnecessary evacuations from botched forecasts and enter a "boy who cried 'wolf'" mentality.

"And then some people just don't perceive the risk to be that high," Rebecca Morss of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., told LiveScience.

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Google's Decade

Ten Reasons Why Google Is Still Number One -- Technology Review

David A. Vise is a Pulitzer Prize winner and coauthor of The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media and Technology Success of Our Time, published by Delacorte Press (Updated edition 2008).

1998: Yahoo and others pass on the chance to buy new search technology developed at Stanford University for $500,000. Their rationale: "Search doesn't matter. Portals do."These rejections forced Sergey Brin and Larry Page to reluctantly take a leave of absence from Stanford (both wanted to become college professors, like their dads) to see if they could turn Google, their new search engine, into a business.

1999: A year later, Google garners $25 million from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, even after Brin and Page insist that each venture-capital firm would only be allowed to invest half the money. This "divide and conquer" strategy leaves the denizens of Sand Hill Road to squabble with one another while Brin and Page retain control over their nascent enterprise. It also enables them to frustrate the moneymen by refusing to deface the most valuable piece of real estate on the Internet--the Google home page--by loading it up with ads, and by turning away numerous CEO candidates.

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Universal Flu Vaccine Enters Clinical Trials

From Futurismic:

It’s that time of year again, when doctors recommend everyone from children to old folks get jabbed with the latest influenza vaccine that may or may not actually be effective against this year’s strain. And it’s that time of year again when people start worrying about the presumably inevitable next great ‘flu pandemic, which many fear could be coming as avian influenza continues to mutate.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just get a single shot that would protect against multiple types…including the possible bird ‘flu pandemic?

Clinical trials of just such a vaccine have begun at Oxford University, led by Dr. Sarah Gilbert of the Jenner Institute. (Via PhysOrg.)

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Delaware Offshore Wind Farm Pattern For Future?

From Future Pundit:

A New York Times article on the politics of wind power looks at the long fight for political approval for an offshore wind power project off the coast of Delaware. The Mid-Atlantic Bight region has large quantities of fairly stable wind power.

The amount of power Dhanju was describing, Mandelstam knew from Kempton, was but a small fraction of an even larger resource along what’s known as the Mid-Atlantic Bight. This coastal region running from Massachusetts to North Carolina contained up to 330,000 megawatts of average electrical capacity. This was, in other words, an amount of guaranteed, bankable power that was larger, in terms of energy equivalence, than the entire mid-Atlantic coast’s total energy demand — not just for electricity but for heating, for gasoline, for diesel and for natural gas. Indeed the wind off the mid-Atlantic represented a full third of the Department of Energy’s estimate of the total American offshore resource of 900,000 megawatts.

Wind projects do not usually operate at nameplate (i.e. max) capacity for most of the time. An onshore wind project might average one third of max output. But wind offshore blows more consistently. I would like to know what average capacity utilization is expected for this Delaware project. I would also like to know how vulnerable a project like this is to a category 3 or 4 hurricane.

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Popular Hallucinogen Faces Growing Legal Opposition In U.S.

Nathan K. calls his use of salvia "just a very gentle letting go, a very gentle relaxing." (Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times)

From The International Herald Tribune:

DALLAS: With a friend videotaping, 27-year-old Christopher Lenzini of Dallas took a hit of Salvia divinorum, the world's most potent hallucinogenic herb, and soon began to imagine, he said, that he was in a boat with little green men.

Lenzini quickly collapsed to the floor and dissolved into convulsive laughter.

When he posted the video on YouTube this summer, friends could not get enough. "It's just funny to see a friend act like a total idiot," he said, "so everybody loved it."

Until a decade ago, the use of salvia was largely limited to those seeking revelation under the tutelage of Mazatec shamans in its native Oaxaca, Mexico. Today, this mind-altering member of the mint family is broadly available for lawful sale online and in head shops across the United States.

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Health Officials Fear Spread Of Lung-Destroying Pneumonia

From The L.A. Times:

Deaths from the combination of a skin infection and the common flu have increased, authorities say.


Health authorities have detected the emergence of a rare but deadly lung-destroying form of pneumonia, sparked by the combination of a skin infection and the common flu.

The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 22 deaths among children last year from the dual infection.

Numbers from the 2007-2008 flu season won't be released until next month, but officials say deaths have increased. The CDC has just begun tracking cases among all age groups.

The number of fatalities, though low, is a sharp increase from previous years, and infectious disease experts worry that an ongoing epidemic of skin infections could drive the numbers higher.

The double infection has appeared before: It was the leading cause of bacterial pneumonia deaths during the 1957-1958 flu pandemic, which killed 2 million people worldwide, including about 70,000 in the U.S.

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Internet Users Need Help To Separate Fact From Fiction As Web Is Full Of Lies, Says Its Inventor

Sir Tim Berners-Lee believes the web spreads too much disinformation

From The Daily Mail:

The internet spreads too much disinformation and needs to be labelled in a way that will help users separate science fact from fiction, the creator of the World Wide Web said.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee sent the first successful communication between an http client and server via the internet in 1990. Now there are more than a 100 million websites in operation.

'One of the things I always remain concerned about is that that medium remains neutral,' the acclaimed British scientist said.

'It's not just where I go to decide where to buy my shoes which is the commercial incentive - it's where I go to decide who I'm going to trust to vote.

'It's where I go maybe to decide what sort of religion I'm going to belong to or not belong to; it's where I go to decide what is actual scientific truth - what I'm actually going to go along with and what is bunkum,' he told BBC News.

Sir Tim was speaking ahead of the launch of a website vetting Foundation he has helped create, which will brand sites it finds to be trustworthy sources of information.

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Astronomers Capture Image Of Alien Planet Orbiting A 'Sun'

From The Telegraph:

Astronomers believe they have captured the first picture of an alien planet in orbit around a star that is similar to our own Sun.

Images of a young star and what is thought to be its companion planet have been taken by astronomers using the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

However they are puzzelled by the distance between the two.

Located around 500 light-years from Earth, the planet in the snapshot is around eight times bigger than Jupiter, the biggest in our solar system and lies more than ten times further from its star than the sun does from Neptune.

Even though the likelihood of a chance alignment between such an object and a similarly young star is thought to be small, it will take up to two years to verify that the star and its likely planet are moving through space together.

The parent star - called 1RXS J160929.1-210524 - is similar in mass to the Sun, but is much younger.

"This is the first time we have directly seen a planetary mass object in a likely orbit around a star like our Sun," said David Lafrenicre, one of the three University of Toronto scientists who describe the fascinating object in a paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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A Biological Clock for Dads Too

From Time Magazine:

Turns out women aren't the only ones with an expiration date on their fertility. An emerging body of research is showing that men, too, have a "biological clock."

Not only do men become less fecund as they age, but their fertility begins to decline relatively early — around age 24, six years or so before women's. Historically, infertility has been seen as a female issue, as has the increased risk of Down syndrome and other birth defects, but studies now also link higher rates of autism, schizophrenia and Down syndrome in children born to older fathers. A recent paper by researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institute found that the risk of bipolar disorder in children increased with paternal age, particularly in children born to men age 55 or older.

It used to be that "if you had hair on your chest, it was your wife's problem," says Barry Behr, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Stanford Medical School and director of Stanford's in vitro fertilization laboratory. Even now, he said, though about half of infertility cases are caused by male factors, such as low sperm count or motility, there are many more tests to evaluate a woman's fertility than a man's.

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Testosterone Levels 'Affect Sexual Attraction'

From The Independent:

Women with high levels of testosterone are more attracted to masculine-looking men like James Bond actor Daniel Craig, scientists said today.

Meanwhile men, whose levels of the hormone are increased, are more attracted to feminine faces like Hollywood actress Natalie Portman.

Researchers at Aberdeen University Face Research Laboratory carried out the first study into the role testosterone plays in attraction between the sexes.

During the study, men and women completed four test sessions each conducted a week apart. In each session volunteers provided a saliva sample which was used to measure testosterone levels.

Researchers found that when asked to choose between different types of faces in each session, the subjects' attitudes changed depending on their testosterone level.

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Should Naples Fear A Big Bang From Vesuvius?

From New Scientist:

RESIDENTS of Naples, take note: the hazard posed by Vesuvius may have to be rethought after the discovery that its magma chamber has been moving upwards towards its mouth.

Bruno Scaillet at the University of Orléans, France, and colleagues studied the proportions and types of crystal in rocks erupted from Vesuvius on four different occasions: 7800 years ago, 3600 years ago, 1929 years ago (Pompeii) and 1536 years ago. This allowed them to estimate the pressure, and hence depth, that each sample crystallised at.

By combining this with results from previous research, they were able to show that Vesuvius's magma chamber has moved upwards by between 9000 and 11,000 metres over the last 22,000 years (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature/07232). It isn't clear why the magma chamber has shifted, but possible reasons include changes in the shape and size of Vesuvius's mouth, a decrease in magma density, and earthquake movements.

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Giant Honeybees Use Shimmering 'Mexican Waves' To Repel Predatory Wasps

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 15, 2008) — The phenomenon of "shimmering" in giant honeybees, in which hundreds—or even thousands—of individual honeybees flip their abdomens upwards within a split-second to produce a Mexican Wave-like pattern across the bee nest, has received much interest but both its precise mode of action and its purpose have long remained a mystery.

In a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE this week, researchers at the University of Graz, Austria, and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, UK, report the finding that shimmering—a remarkable capacity of rapid communication in giant honeybees—acts as a defensive mechanism, which repels predatory hornets, forcing them to hunt free-flying bees, further afield, rather than foraging bees directly from the honeybee nest.

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Fear Of Physics

From New York Times Science:

The new particle collider in Europe hasn’t hurt anyone there yet, but all the talk about a “doomsday machine” seems to be taking a toll elsewhere, according to Reuters (hat tip: Charles Mann). It reports from Bhopal that Indians were so alarmed by reports that the Large Hadron Collider could destroy the world that they flocked to temples to pray and fast. One teenage girl traumatized by the warnings on television committed suicide, according to Reuters, which quoted her father: “We tried to divert her attention and told her she should not worry about such things, but to no avail.”

My colleague Dennis Overbye has done a good job of debunking this week’s fears, and Ron Bailey of Reason Magazine has done a nice analysis of the odds.

For further reassurance, I recommend an analysis by Max Tegmark of M.I.T. and Nick Bostrom of Oxford University. (Dr. Bostrom was featured in my column last year about the possibility that we’re living in a computer simulation.) Dr. Tegmark and Dr. Bostrom estimate, based on the relatively late evolution of life on Earth and on what we observe in the rest of the universe, that the annual risk of our planet’s being annihilated by high-energy particle collisions (or, for that matter, by an asteroid or by extraterrestrials) is one in a trillion.

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Top 10 Human Inventions of All Time

Language Is The Number #1 Invention

From Top Tenz:

This list can’t help but be relative and therefore controversial. As always be kind and appreciate the effort even if you disagree.

Although humans are not alone as tool using animals, we are definitely the planet’s designated experts in the field. Our use of invention, or the innovation of altering an object or process in new ways, may be what truly defines us as a species. Every once in a long while, something is invented which changes, in some small way, the very nature of our lives. Over time, this has made us unique among the animals. While little inventions come out every day, it is these big ones that move us forward into whatever the destiny of mankind turns out to be.

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Blurred Out: 51 Things You Aren't Allowed to See on Google Maps

From IT Security:

IT Security Editors

Depending on which feature you use, Google Maps offers a satellite view or a street-level view of tons of locations around the world. You can look up landmarks like the Pyramids of Egypt or the Great Wall of China, as well as more personal places, like your ex’s house. But for all of the places that Google Maps allows you to see, there are plenty of places that are off-limits. Whether it’s due to government restrictions, personal-privacy lawsuits or mistakes, Google Maps has slapped a "Prohibited" sign on the following 51 places.

Read more and check out the following 51 places ....

The Science Of Glass

The Nature of Glass Remains Anything But Clear
-- New York Times Science

It is well known that panes of stained glass in old European churches are thicker at the bottom because glass is a slow-moving liquid that flows downward over centuries.

Well known, but wrong. Medieval stained glass makers were simply unable to make perfectly flat panes, and the windows were just as unevenly thick when new.

The tale contains a grain of truth about glass resembling a liquid, however. The arrangement of atoms and molecules in glass is indistinguishable from that of a liquid. But how can a liquid be as strikingly hard as glass?

“They’re the thickest and gooiest of liquids and the most disordered and structureless of rigid solids,” said Peter Harrowell, a professor of chemistry at the University of Sydney in Australia, speaking of glasses, which can be formed from different raw materials. “They sit right at this really profound sort of puzzle.”

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The Science Of Lightning Strikes

Struck By Lightning -- The Walrus

In the summer of 2002, I was camped at the mouth of the French River, lying on my Therm-a-Rest waiting out a thunderstorm, when my tent was struck by lightning. It was over before I knew what had happened, before adrenalin had any role to play, before fear took over. My tent poles took the charge and I was spared, completely. The narrow escape got me asking around. How often does this happen? It turns out everybody has a lightning story.

Floyd Woods, a retired truck driver from Ardbeg, Ontario, was twelve years old in 1943 when his house was hit. The strike shot through the radio antenna, exploded in the living room intoa blue fireball that roared down the hall, lifting up the linoleum runner by the tacks, ripping the nails out of the floor, splintering the house walls as fine as kindling before it ran off over the bedrock outside and died. Woods’ guitar was hanging on the wall over his bed. Sixty-five years later, he still shakes his head: “That strike burned the guitar strings off, bing, bing, bing, threw me right out of bed and across the room so I ached for a month. Nothin’ will move you faster than lightning. Nothin’.”

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How Quickly Can Sharks Detect Blood In The Water?

From The Straight Dope:

Dear Cecil:

We've all seen it in a movie: A small group of people are swimming in the sea. Someone gets hurt, blood touches water, and instantly sharks appear who then devour the party in a ruthless and very painful way. But how fast does the odor or taste of blood go in water? Am I right to believe that it takes a while for a shark a mile away to taste it?

— David, Belgium

Cecil replies:

I'll confess I haven't seen a lot of Belgian shark movies, David, but virtually any Hollywood studio exec would see a major problem with the treatment you've outlined above. If the shark shows up the second the hemoglobin hits the water, where's the unbearable tension? What we're missing is that excruciating interval of stillness between the close-up of slowly seeping blood and the moment the here-comes-the-shark music kicks in. You're right, though, to suspect that this interval does tend to run a little shorter on the big screen than in real life.

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Scientists: Is Sleep Essential?

From Med Gadget:

Writing in the latest PLoS Biology, researchers from the University of Wisconsin, Madison are wondering whether sleep is really a biological necessity, or maybe it's just a function created by evolution to kill time and avoid stress.

From the article in PLoS Biology:

Everybody knows that sleep is important, yet the function of sleep seems like the mythological phoenix: “Che vi sia ciascun lo dice, dove sia nessun lo sa” (“that there is one they all say, where it may be no one knows,” Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte [1790], Così fan tutte). But what if the search for an essential function of sleep is misguided? What if sleep is not required but rather a kind of extreme indolence that animals indulge in when they have no more pressing needs, such as eating or reproducing? In many circumstances sleeping may be a less dangerous choice than roaming around, wasting energy and exposing oneself to predators. Also, if sleep is just one out of a repertoire of available behaviors that is useful without being essential, it is easier to explain why sleep duration varies so much across species. This “null hypothesis” would explain why nobody has yet identified a core function of sleep. But how strong is the evidence supporting it? And are there counterexamples?

So far the null hypothesis has survived better than alternatives positing some core function for sleep [8–10]. In what follows we shall test the null hypothesis by considering three of its key corollaries. If the null hypothesis were right, we would expect to find: (1) animals that do not sleep at all; (2) animals that do not need recovery sleep when they stay awake longer; and, finally, (3) that lack of sleep occurs without serious consequences.

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What Stuff Is Worth More Than Its Weight In Gold?

From Evil Mad Scientist:

It's a common figure of speech to say that x is worth its weight in y, where y is usually (but not always) gold. But most of us don't buy and weigh gold very often, so how do you connect that to real life? Does "worth its weight" in pennies or $100 bills make any more sense?

We have collected here a bunch of examples for different things that represent a wide range of monetary value per unit weight, in what might make a useful calibration chart for your future idiomatic usage.

Let's start this off with a down-to-earth question. Which has a higher monetary density: dimes or quarters? In other words, if you had to carry around $1000 worth of either dimes or quarters, which should you ask for?

Item -- Price per pound
Gold -- $12,000
Platinum -- $20,679
Fifty Dollar Bills -- $22,680
Cocaine -- $22,680
Hundred Dollar Bills -- $45,359
Rhodium -- $77,292
Good-quality, one-carat diamonds -- $11.4 M
LSD -- $55 M
Antimatter -- $26 Quadrillion

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Top 10 Amazing Physics Videos

From Wired:

Tesla coils, superconductors, and hilarious music videos are great reasons to be excited about physics. Here are some of our favorites.

Read and watch the videos here ....

Ten Things You Don’t Know About The Earth

From Discover Magazine:

Good advice from the 70s progressive band. Look around you. Unless you’re one of the Apollo astronauts, you’ve lived your entire life within a few hundred kilometers of the surface of the Earth. There’s a whole planet beneath your feet, 6.6 sextillion tons of it, one trillion cubic kilometers of it. But how well do you know it?

Below are ten facts about the Earth — the second in my series of Ten Things You Don’t Know (the first was on the Milky Way). Some things I already knew (and probably you do, too), some I had ideas about and had to do some research to check, and others I totally made up. Wait! No! Kidding. They’re all real. But how many of them do you know? Be honest.

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The Rise And Fall Of The Space Shuttle

From American Scientist:

Since NASA's creation in the 1950s, its history has followed a course that calls to mind the Greek tragedies—tremendous early success, followed by a series of catastrophes and failures, which share the same root cause. Nearly 40 years have passed since NASA had its most notable successes, which culminated in Neil Armstrong's walk on the lunar surface. Since then, the agency has struggled to come up with meaningful goals that could take advantage of the sustained political support the agency has enjoyed over the decades. NASA has a rich tradition and employs the world's best scientists and engineers. Yet in recent decades its most notable moments have come in the form of disasters and their aftermath. And the institutional and cultural problems that led to the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 went largely uncorrected for 17 years and contributed to the Columbia accident in 2003. The agency's identity crisis continues and will stretch into the next presidential administration and perhaps beyond. How the story of its space shuttle program will end remains highly uncertain.

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Full Coverage Of Hurricane Ike: Hurricane Blogs, News, And Webcam Links -- This Post Is Bumped To The Top Of Cool Science News Till Sunday

Tracking Hurricane Ike

Click Here For Updated Picture

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HURRICANE BLOGS, NEWS, WEBCAMS, AND LINKS

Hurricane/Weather News

Storm Pulse
National Hurricane Center -- Home Site
National Hurricane Center -- Satellite Shots
National Hurricane Center -- Sign Up For Email Advisories
Weather.com -- Hurricane Central News Center
Weather.com -- Hurricane Central News Center Updates
NOLA -- New Orleans, Louisiana news
Houston Chronicle -- Hurricane News
NOAA Satellite And Information Service -- Home Page
Crown Weather Services -- Weather Aggregator

Texas/Louisiana Weather Observations

Coastal Texas Observations
Southwest Louisiana Observations
Southeast Louisiana Observations
Ike Marine Weather Observations

Weather And Hurricane Blogs

Weather Underground
Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog
Weather Nerd
Hurricane Track
Miami Hurricane

Blogs For Ike

Twitter search for “Hurricane Ike”
Google Blog Search for “Hurricane Ike”
BlogPulse search for “Hurricane Ike”
Flickr photo/video search for “Hurricane Ike”
YouTube video search for “Hurricane Ike”
HurricanePreparedness.org

News Links For Hurricane Ike

Global Storm Tracker -- Yahoo News
Weather News -- Yahoo News
Hurricane Ike -- Yahoo News (Recent Stories on Ike)
Hurricane Ike -- Google News (Stories For The Past 24 Hours)
News and Newspaper Websites in Louisiana -- ABYZ News Directory
News And Newspaper Websites In Mississippi -- ABYZ News Directory
News And Newspaper Websites In Texas -- ABYZ News Directory

Texas News Media Links (Hat Tip to Crown Weather)

Live News Cameras Hurricane Ike Center
Hurricane Ike Live TV Coverage Wall (FLHurricane)
Hurricane Ike Live TV Feeds From All Houston Stations
Live Hurricane Ike Coverage From All Houston Stations (MaroonSpoon)
Hurricane Ike Resources From OneStorm.org
Broadcast Coverage From Internet Partnership Radio
Broadcast Coverage From Hurricane City
Broadcast Coverage From The Weather Radio Broadcast Network
Texas News Media Links
KTRH AM 740 Radio Houston
MyFox Houston
KHOU TV Houston, TX
ABC 13 TV Houston, TX
Channel 2 TV Houston, TX
Houston/Galveston, Texas Radio Scanner Feed
KGBT TV 4 Local News From Harlingen, Texas
KRGV TV 5 Local News From Weslaco, Texas
Local News From KIII TV 3 From Corpus Christi, Texas
Local News From KRISTV From Corpus Christi, Texas
KURV 780 AM Talk Radio From Mcallen, Texas
Q94.5 Brownsville, TX
KQXX 105.5 From Brownsville, Texas
Wild 104 From Brownsville, Texas

Texas/Louisiana Webcam Links (Hat Tip To Crown Weather)

Webcamplaza.net
Louisiana Webcams
Texas Webcams
Louisiana Webcams
Texas Webcams (WeatherMatrix)
Louisiana Webcams (ABC Webcams)
Texas Webcams (ABC Webcams)
Upper Texas Coast Webcams (HurricaneCity)
Brownsville, Texas-Matamoras, Mexico Webcams
Corpus Christi, Texas Webcam #1
Corpus Christi, Texas Webcam #2
Freeport, TX Webcam
Galveston, TX Webcams
Galveston, TX Webcam (WeatherUnderground)
Galveston-Houston, TX Webcams
Houston, TX Traffic Cams
Houston, TX Webcams (KHOU TV)
Houston, TX Webcams (Ch. 2 TV)
Houston, TX Webcam (WeatherUnderground)
KRGV Tv5 Webcam, Weslaco, Texas
Matagorda Bay Webcam
Port Aransas, Texas Webcam #1
Port Aransas, Texas Webcam #2
Rio Grande Webcam
South Padre Island, Texas Webcams
South Padre Island, Texas Webcam #1
South Padre Island, Texas Webcam #2
South Padre Island, Texas Webcam #3
South Padre Island, Texas Webcam #4
Webcam From A Platform In The Western Gulf of Mexico (NDBC)

Experiment Boosts Hopes for Space Solar Power

From Space.com

WASHINGTON — A former NASA scientist has used radio waves to transmit solar power a distance of 92 miles (148 km) between two Hawaiian islands, an achievement that he says proves the technology exists to beam solar power from satellites back to Earth.

John C. Mankins demonstrated the solar power transmission for the Discovery Channel, which paid for the four month experiment and will broadcast the results Friday at 9 p.m. EDT. His vision is to transmit solar power collected by orbiting satellites as large as 1,102 pounds (500 kg) to lake-sized receiver stations on Earth.

Mankins, who worked at NASA for 25 years and managed the agency's space-based solar program before it was disbanded, transmitted 20 watts of power between the two islands in May. The receivers, however, were so small that less than one one-thousandth of a percent of the power was received, Mankins said.

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World's Strongest Hurricanes Could Be Getting Stronger

Gustav and Hanna spin in the Caribbean Sea last week. A study released today found that the strongest Atlantic hurricanes have become stronger due to global warming over the past 25 years.

From USA Today:

The strongest hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean have become more intense due to global warming over the past 25 years, according to a new study in Wednesday's edition of the British journal Nature. The findings add fuel to the simmering argument in the meteorological community about the Earth's changing climate, and its relationship to the power of tropical systems worldwide.

Scientists from Florida State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison analyzed satellite data from nearly 2,000 tropical cyclones around the world from 1981 to 2006, and found that the strongest storms are getting stronger, especially over the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Tropical cyclones are the umbrella term for hurricanes (in the Atlantic and east Pacific), typhoons (in the West Pacific) and cyclones (in the Indian).

"As seas warm, the ocean has more energy that can be converted to tropical cyclone wind," FSU professor of geography and study lead author James B. Elsner explained.

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The Science Behind A Storm Surge

Hurricane Ike, still forming in the Gulf of Mexico, caused floods near Surfside Beach, Texas September 12, 2008. Hurricane Ike closed in on the Texas coast on Friday, pushing a wall of water that weather officials warned could bring certain death to those who did not heed mandatory evacuation orders.

From MSNBC:

As Hurricane Ike races toward Texas, it is pushing a mound of water in front of it that could inundate parts of the Gulf coast with up to 25 feet of water. The surge involves some incredible feats of physics, and in many hurricanes it’s the leading cause of death.

Galveston Island, Texas, destroyed at least once before by a major hurricane in 1900, began to see the Ike-related water creeping up along its beaches Thursday and by Friday, parts of the city of Galveston were flooded by the surge coming in from Galveston Bay.

And, "it's only going to get worse," said Lance Wood, the Science and Operations Officer for the Houston/Galveston National Weather Service (NWS) office.

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A Guide To Hurricanes

From Scientific American:

Fay, Gustav, Hanna, Ike: What's next for the U.S.? What causes nature's destructive storms? How do scientists study and predict them? How are they linked to global warming?

Scientific American has compiled an extensive and detailed examination of hurricanes and what the future may hold for us. The link to read this guide is here.

With Ike, Size Matters For Killer Storm Surge

From My Way News/AP

Hurricane Ike's gargantuan size - not its strength - will likely push an extra large storm surge inland in a region already prone to it, experts said Thursday.

Ike's giant girth means more water piling up on Texas and Louisiana coastal areas for a longer time, topped with bigger waves. So storm surge - the prime killer in hurricanes - will be far worse than a typical storm of Ike's strength, the National Hurricane Center said.

And because coastal waters in Texas and Louisiana are so shallow, storm surge is usually larger there than in other regions, according to storm experts. A 1900 hurricane following a similar track to Ike inundated Galveston Island, killing at least 8,000 people - America's deadliest storm.

"It's a good recipe for surge," said Benton McGee, supervisory hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey's storm surge center in Ruston, La. "We're already seeing water being piled up in the Gulf. On top of that you're going to have water forced into the bays along the coast."

The National Hurricane Center is forecasting a 20-foot surge - a rapid rising of water inundating areas and moving inland - for a large swath of Texas and the Louisiana coasts. Above that, the center predicts "large and dangerous battering waves." Waves could be 50 feet tall, said hurricane center spokesman and meteorologist Dennis Feltgen.

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Antarctic Sea Ice Increases Despite Warming

Cold, snowy, and stuck at the “bottom” of the Earth, Antarctica might seem like a dull place. But this big continent can produce a surprisingly dynamic range of conditions. One example of this range is temperature trends. Although Antarctica warmed around the perimeter from 1982 to 2004, where huge icebergs calved and some ice shelves disintegrated, it cooled closer to the pole.

From the New Scientist:

The amount of sea ice around Antarctica has grown in recent Septembers in what could be an unusual side-effect of global warming, experts say.

In the southern hemisphere winter, when emperor penguins huddle together against the biting cold, ice on the sea around Antarctica has been increasing since the late 1970s, perhaps because climate change means shifts in winds, sea currents or snowfall.

At the other end of the planet, Arctic sea ice is now close to matching a September 2007 record low at the tail end of the northern summer, in a threat to the hunting lifestyles of indigenous peoples and creatures such as polar bears.

"The Antarctic wintertime ice extent increased...at a rate of 0.6% per decade" from 1979 to 2006, says Donald Cavalieri, a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

At 19 million square kilometres, it is still slightly below records from the early 1970s of 20 million, he says. Since 1979 however, the average year-round ice extent has risen too.

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My Comment: OK .... because it is getting warmer .... we now have more ice in the Antarctic. Is it me, but is this a contradiction?

Sigh..... this article makes no sense. Shame on The New Scientist, they should know better that you need to have data before making explanations on explaining a climatic effect.

Painting Rooftops White Would Slow Global Warming

From Sustain A Blog:

Study: If we painted every rooftop in 100 major cities white, it would offset the entire planet’s carbon dioxide emissions for one year. That’s nearly 44 metric gigatons.

It makes sense. We all know white reflects heat (that’s why we wear white shirts and dresses on hot days), and we even knew that painting rooftops white lessens the need for air conditioning. But until now, we didn’t know that changing dark-colored surfaces to white would help fight against global warming.

The news broke yesterday at California’s Climate Change Research Conference. Hashem Akbari, attending the conference from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, announced that replacing dark shingles on an average-sized household rooftop with a lighter color would offset 10 metric tons of carbon dioxide—comparable to taking two mid-sized cars off the road for a year.

Speaking of roadways, they’re part of the problem too. Because of its cheap nature, most roads are paved with black asphalt instead of light grey concrete, which causes roads to absorb an inordinate amount of heat. Repaving roads with lighter-colored materials would have a similar impact to painting rooftops.

California already mandates that newly-built large buildings have light-colored rooftops, but the law was intended to decrease air conditioning costs. Akbari hopes to enlist the United Nations in an effort to convince major cities to make their roadways and rooftops more pale.

Read a full summary of the report here.

Black Hole's 'Birth Scream' Heard Across Universe

From FOX News:

Six months ago, satellite telescopes spotted an exceptionally bright burst of energy that would have been the most distant object in the universe ever visible to the naked eye, if anyone had noticed it.

Even though no humans have reported seeing it directly, the gamma-ray burst, an explosion that signals the violent death of a massive star, is changing theories of how these events look.

Gamma-ray bursts are typically accompanied by intense releases of other forms of radiation, from X-rays to visible light.

This burst, dubbed GRB 080319B, was first detected by the Swift satellite on March 19, while the spacecraft was serendipitously looking at another gamma-ray burst in the same area of the sky.

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9 Big Questions On NASA Infighting

From Popular Mechanics:

As if a new administration and the rise of the private space industry weren't enough, it's suddenly become an even more critical time for NASA, with its ambitious plans to send manned missions to the moon and Mars while facing mounting fiscal and political realities. The Orion spacecraft at the heart of the agency's next-gen Constellation exploration program is being designed to resupply the International Space Station and fly to the moon, but the space shuttle fleet is due to retire in 2010 and Orion won't be ready to fly in time. The plan is to use Russia's spacecraft to make the supply runs, but that nation's war with Georgia has cast doubt on that plan. Grumbling from engineers and officials inside NASA is joining a chorus of outside critics, so we asked four-time shuttle astronaut Tom Jones to help make sense of the turmoil. —Jennifer Bogo

In the internal e-mail written by NASA administrator Michael Griffin, which was leaked to the Orlando Sentinel recently, he articulates a catch-22 in the space program: If we continue to fly the shuttle past its retirement date, it harms our long-term prospects of manned travel by competing for funds with the Constellation program. But if we retire the shuttle as planned, our short-term prospects are impaired by the tenuous situation with Russia. Have we painted ourselves into a corner?

Remember, Griffin was ordered to stop flying the shuttle in 2010. You know, get it off the stage as soon as possible. Then he was told, "Bring on Orion as quickly as you can after that." The original plan, about four years ago, was for Orion to be ready by 2012. But Congress has been given budgets every year by the president that have not included the funds to do these things at the pace they need. So the two-year gap turned into a five-year gap. Congress figured there was no downside: Just let it slip and, big deal, we have a long gap. That was all fine when it was five or six years in the future, but now the Russians have turned unfriendly, and we don't know where that's going to go. And suddenly a bunch of people are saying, "There's this big, long gap, and it's unacceptable, and, NASA, why didn't you take care of this?"

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Why Ike Could Be Texas' Worst Nightmare

The unnamed Category 4 hurricane that slammed into Galveston, Texas Sept. 8, 1900 remains the deadliest ever to hit the United States, having killed at least 8,000 people (estimates vary) and leveling virtually the entire town. Credit: NOAA

From Live Science:

As Hurricane Ike revs up again over the Gulf of Mexico, residents of coastal Texas, especially Houston and Galveston, are preparing for the arrival of the monstrous storm, which could be the most devastating that the Lone Star State has seen Hurricane Alicia came ashore in 1983, causing nearly $6 billion in damage and 21 fatalities.

Ike is huge. Hurricane-force winds extend out 120 miles (195 kilometers) from the storm's center, and tropical storm-force winds reach out 275 miles (445 km), both measurements exceeding what's seen with many storms. Ike could reach major hurricane status as a Category 3 before it makes landfall late Friday or early Saturday morning somewhere along the Texas coast.

And right now it looks like that somewhere will be the Houston/Galveston area.

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