Date: August 28, 2014

Doomsday Debate: Asteroid Threat Could Divide Society

August 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments




By Tanya Lewis


Imagine an asteroid were hurtling toward Earth, with a 1-in-1,000 chance of hitting the planet. How would humanity respond to the news, and is there anything we could do about it? A former NASA spacecraft navigator details one possible scenario in a new sci-fi novel.
In "The Darkest Side of Saturn: Odyssey of a Reluctant Prophet of Doom" (iUniverse, 2014), two scientists discover a space rock that could hit Earth in 16 years. The discovery of the asteroid threat pits the scientists against each other, and juxtaposes science against religious fanaticism as humanity attempts to come to terms with the impending doomsday event.
If a 2-mile-wide (3.2 kilometers) asteroid collided with Earth, the impact "would almost certainly be a civilization-destroying event," said author Tony Taylor, of Tempe, Arizona. 
Taylor is not a spokesman for NASA or an expert on asteroids, but in his career, he has guided spacecraft to every planet in the solar system as a spacecraft navigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and later at the aerospace consulting firm KinetX Aerospace in Tempe, Arizona.
The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs measured at least 6 miles (10 km) across, most scientists agree, but even a 2-mile-wide space rock would likely cause an explosion tens of times larger than that caused by all of the world's nuclear weapons being detonated at once, Taylor told Live Science.
"Hundreds of millions of people would die — if not from direct impact, from starvation and wars," he said.
The book's title is based on the Voyager spacecraft's first photos of the night side of Saturn. The novel explores not only the science of detecting a dangerous asteroid on a collision course with the planet, but also the social, political and religious dimensions of such a doomsday event.
Handling the news
How humanity responds to news of an asteroid threat would depend on the odds that the space rock would hit the planet, and how far in advance humans knew about the potential collision. If the rock were due to strike Earth in just a few months or years, there probably wouldn't be much controversy about it, and governments would likely work together to try to prepare for the impact, Taylor said. 
"If you had a revolver with 1,000 chambers and one round, would you play Russian roulette and pull the trigger?" Taylor asked. "Of course you wouldn’t."
But if the chances of the asteroid hitting Earth were less clear-cut, as is the case in Taylor's novel, then it becomes a question of who believes there's a risk and who denies it, he said.
For instance, initially, scientists might debate how the news should be revealed to the public. In Taylor's book, this is what happens between the two scientists who discover the asteroid. The main female character, an astronomer, wants to keep the discovery confined to within the scientific community until it can be confirmed unanimously. But her male partner, a spacecraft engineer, wants to reveal it to the public, which he ultimately does behind her back.
Once news of the asteroid gets out, it's easy to imagine how scientific rationalism may become clouded by religious fanaticism, as Taylor suggests in his book. After he makes the announcement, the male scientist gains unwanted attention from a religious fanatic and his followers. The scientist struggles to promote logic over the preacher's faith-based dogma. 
Of course, Taylor's book is fiction, so it's impossible to know how such an event may play out in reality.
Close encounters
There are roughly 4,700 potentially hazardous asteroids that measure more than 330 feet (100 meters) across that could pose a danger to Earth, NASA estimates, and 70 percent of these rocks haven't been identified, Taylor said.
The Chelyabinsk meteorite that hit Russia in February 2013 was only about 65 feet (20 m) wide, but the impact produced an explosion equivalent to 500 kilotons of TNT (about 25 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima near the end of World War II), and indirectly injured about 1,500 people.
On the same day, another asteroid measuring 150 feet (46 m) across, known as 2012 DA14, came within 17,200 miles (27,680 km) of Earth, passing beneath the orbits of the moon and satellites.
NASA and other organizations are constantly monitoring the skies for these near-Earth objects — asteroids and comets that are nudged by the gravity of other planets into orbits that come within the neighborhood of Earth.
But just having a monitoring program in place isn't enough, Taylor said. If an asteroid is discovered, the scientists will likely not be the ones with the final say on whether to act or not. "What's needed is a political endeavor," he said.

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Scientists now say they were wrong about inner Earth mantle

August 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Illustration of inner Earthhuffingtonpost.comMaybe we were mistaken about Earth's mantle, the layer of our rocky planet that lies between its core and the thin crust on which we live. For years, earth scientists were convinced that the mantle's entire...

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Brewing up the perfect nap! Scientists agree that coffee naps recharge better

August 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments




vox.com

If you're feeling sleepy and want to wake yourself up — and have 20 minutes or so to spare before you need to be fully alert — there's something you should try. It's more effective than drinking a cup of coffee or taking a quick nap.
It's drinking a cup of coffee and then taking a quick nap. This is called a coffee nap.
It might sound crazy: conventional wisdom is that caffeine interferes with sleep. But if you caffeinate immediately before napping and sleep for 20 minutes or less, you can exploit a quirk in the way both sleep and caffeine affect your brain to maximize alertness. Here's the science behind the idea.

How a coffee nap works


To understand a coffee nap, you have to understand how caffeine affects you. After it's absorbed through your small intestine and passes into your bloodstream, it crosses into your brain. There, it fits into receptors that are normally filled by a similarly-shaped molecule, called adenosine.
Adenosine is a byproduct of brain activity, and when it accumulates at high enough levels, it plugs into these receptors and makes you feel tired. But with the caffeine blocking the receptors, it's unable to do so. As Stephen R. Braun writes inBuzz: the Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine, it's like "putting a block of wood under one of the brain’s primary brake pedals."
it takes about 20 minutes for caffeine to hit your brain
Now, caffeine doesn't block every single adenosine receptor — it competes with adenosine for these spots, filling some, but not others.
But here's the trick of the coffee nap: sleeping naturally clears adenosinefrom the brain. If you nap for longer than 15 or 20 minutes, your brain is more likely to enter deeper stages of sleep that take some time to recover from. But shorter naps generally don't lead to this so-called "sleep inertia" — and it takes around 20 minutes for the caffeine to get through your gastrointestinal tract and bloodstream anyway.
So if you nap for those 20 minutes, you'll reduce your levels of adenosine just in time for the caffeine to kick in. The caffeine will have less adenosine to compete with, and will thereby be even more effective in making you alert.

Experiments show coffee naps are better than coffee or naps

nap 3
(Greg Hirson)

Scientists haven't directly observed this going on in the brain after a coffee nap — it's all based on their knowledge of how caffeine, adenosine, and sleep each affect the brain independently.
But they have directly observed the effects of coffee naps, and experiments have shown they're more effective than coffee or naps alone in maximizing alertness.
people who took a coffee nap committed fewer errors in a driving simulator
In a few different studies, researchers at Loughborough University in the UK found that when tired participants took a 15-minute coffee nap, they went on to commit fewer errors in a driving simulator than when they were given only coffee, or only took a nap (or were given a decaf placebo). This was true even if they had trouble falling asleep, and just laid in bed half-asleep during the 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, a Japanese study found that people who took a caffeine nap before taking a series of memory tests performed significantly better on them compared to people who solely took a nap, or took a nap then washed their faces or had a bright light shone in their eyes. They also subjectively rated themselves as less tired.
Interestingly, there's even some evidence that caffeine naps can help people go for relatively long periods without proper sleep. As part of one study, 24 young men went without proper sleep for a 24-hour period, taking only short naps. 12 of them, who were given just a placebo, performed markedly worse on a series of cognition tests, compared to their baseline scores. 12 others, who had caffeine before their naps, managed scores roughly the same as their baselines for the entire day.

How to take a coffee nap

coffee
(James Lee)

Taking a coffee nap is pretty straightforward. First, drink coffee. Theoretically, you could drink another caffeinated beverage, but tea and soda have generally have much less caffeine than coffee, and energy drinks are disgusting. Here's a good database of the amount of caffeine in many types of drinks.
You need to drink it quickly, to give yourself a decently long window of time to sleep as it's going through your gastrointestinal tract and entering your bloodstream. If it's tough for you to drink a lot of hot coffee quickly, good options might be iced coffee or espresso.
Right after you're finished, immediately try to go to sleep. Don't worry if it doesn't come easily — just reaching a tranquil half-asleep stage can be helpful.
Finally, make sure to wake up within 20 minutes, so you don't enter the deeper stages of sleep, and you're awake when the caffeine is just starting to hit your brain.
Voila: the perfect coffee nap.

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Scientists Experiment With Altering Memories in Mice ~ Rewiring Changes Bad Memories to Good

August 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments


By Gautam Naik

In experiments on mice, scientists rewired the circuits of the brain and changed the animals' bad memories into good ones.
The rewriting of the memory wasn't done with drugs but by using light to control the activity of brain cells. While science is a long way from achieving a similar feat in people, it adds to a body of research that is starting to uncover the physiological basis of memory.
"This could pave the way to rewire the circuits in the brain" to treat disorders such as post-traumatic stress syndrome, depression or other psychiatric illnesses, said Roger Redondo, neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of the study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
A memory is created when a past experience becomes encoded in a network of neurons in the brain. The memory is recalled when the neurons fire in a particular sequence.
Some aspects of the memory can endure a long time, while others are more fickle. "The memory of a romantic first meal out with a partner may take on a different mood when the relationship falters," said Tomonori Takeuchi and Richard Morris at the University of Edinburgh, in an article accompanying the study. "In these cases, memory of the place remains accurate, but the positive associations with that place are lost."
White mouse. Published Credit: Photo Researchers/Getty Images White mouse. Published Credit: Photo Researchers/Getty Images Getty Images/Photo Researchers R
Dr. Redondo and his MIT colleagues set out to answer two questions: Which specific circuits in the brain store our good and bad memories? And can a good memory be changed to a bad one; and vice versa?
The researchers established that the "where" of a memory is encoded in cells found in a brain structure called the hippocampus, while the "emotion" linked to it —whether one feels good or bad about the place—is embedded in a brain area called the amygdala. The two parts of the brain are connected.
The MIT team wanted to see if it could change the association between the "where" of the memory and the "emotion" linked with it. To get there, they used a cutting-edge technique known as optogenetics, which uses light to control brain cells that have been genetically sensitized to it.
In the case of the mice, a fiber-optic cable was inserted via a tiny hole in the animal's skull, allowing a laser beam to be fired through the wire to activate individual neurons in the brain.
They began by giving one set of male mice fearful memories (via a small electric shock to the foot) and by providing other mice with pleasurable memories (by allowing them to interact with female mice). By firing the laser into the mouse brain, the scientists could identify the specific cells that were activated when each of the two memories were formed.
That was followed by a "place-preference" test. A laser was fired to the mouse brain when the animal entered a designated area, which activated the previously identified brain cells. When this was done, the fear-conditioned mice moved away from the target zone, while the pleasure-conditioned mice lingered in that area longer because they recalled the positive memory.
The next day, the fear-conditioned mice were placed in a different area. There, they were allowed to interact with female mice, while the fear-associated memory cells were artificially stimulated with the laser. The scientists hoped that the pleasurable exposure to the female mice would rewire the males' previously fear-conditioned circuits.
To test this, the male mice were returned to the original target zone. When the laser was again used to stimulate the neurons, they now lingered longer in the target zone. This indicated that their original fear-conditioned circuit had been changed to one associated with pleasure.
The researchers said they were able to do the opposite as well—change a pleasurable memory in mice into one associated with fear.
"We identified the circuit, and we've showed that we can manipulate such circuits artificially," said Dr. Redondo.
It isn't practical to fire lasers into human brains under a similar setup. But the Nature experiment could inspire other approaches that may prove medically useful. For example, now that the memory-forming circuit has been identified, it may be possible to influence it by other means, such as using a drug.

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Santa Fe, New Mexico city council votes to decriminalize marijuana

August 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments

ALBUQUERQUE N.M. (Reuters) - Santa Fe on Wednesday became the latest U.S. city to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana, with lawmakers in the New Mexico capital voting to change local statutes rather than put the issue to a publ...

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Scientists are recording the sound of the whole planet

August 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Researchers are listening to everything from airplanes to bat calls in order to learn more about the state of the environment

By Josh Dzieza

In a few weeks, sensors in Indiana will go online that will record, in the words of Bryan Pijanowski, every sound the Earth makes. The array of microphones, geophones, and barometric gauges will run for a year, taping everything from the songs of birds arriving in the spring to the vibrations of the continent as ocean waves pound the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. They will measure earthquakes on the other side of the world and the stomping of cattle nearby, the ultrasonic whistles of bats and the barometric drop of cold fronts. “I joke to my physicist friends that if I had a microphone small enough, I could record the Higgs boson,” Pijanowski says.

Day Australia spectrogram
A color-coded spectrogram of 24 hours of noise in the Australian bush, by Michael Towsey of the Queensland University of Technology. The morning chorus starts at 4:30AM and the evening cicada chorus around 6:00PM.


Pijanowski is a soundscape ecologist, a term he coined three years ago to describe a new approach to studying sound. Rather than look at how, for example, a single species of frog calls for a mate, soundscape ecologists study how all the sounds in a space interact, from frog calls to car traffic to thunder. "There are what I call rhythms of nature, there are periodicities like the dawn chorus and certain crescendos during the seasons," Pijanowski says, referring to the way birds burst into song at sunrise. He believes listening to these patterns can tell us important things about the state of the natural world.

Though still small, the field is growing, thanks in no small measure to Pijanowski’s tireless efforts (and those of his grad students). For the last several years he’s been circling the globe, depositing microphones in Costa Rica, Borneo, Tippecanoe, the Sonoran desert, Alabama, the wildfire-ravaged Chiricahuas, and urban parks in Chicago, often giving talks along the way. You get the sense he’s slightly reserved except when talking about sound, at which point he gestures expansively and uses words like "marvelous," "magnificent," and "glorious."
"There are what I call rhythms of nature."
Earlier this year, Pijanowski launched the Global Soundscape Project, which is building a map of the world's sounds using an app that turns phones into recorders. Occasionally he has an IMAX crew in tow, part of a soundscape education program he’s filming. And every few months he convenes soundscape researchers for workshops, part of a grant from the National Science Foundation. He invites people from outside the sciences to participate. "When you look at arrangements of sound, working with musicians helps you to think about the orchestration of an ecosystem," he explains.
The idea that animal sounds follow a complex order goes back to Bernie Krause, a musician who in the 1960s and ’70s made a living doing sound work for the film industry, frequently taping things like jungle noises and whale songs. He became enamored of nature sounds and started accompanying researchers into the field to make recordings, eventually becoming the preeminent wildlife acoustician. In 1985, he was called on to lure a confused humpback whale, Humphrey, out of the Sacramento river using a feeding song.

Pijanowski's recording of cicadas in Borneo

Costa Rica soundscape
Pijanowski's recording of an hour in the La Selva rainforest in Costa Rica. The top spectrogram is the full hour and the three bottom ones are zoomed-in images of the 26 seconds following each of the three red markers. The audio corresponds to the zoomed in images.

As he sat in jungles and deserts around the world, Krause noticed that the sounds he heard could be surprisingly orderly. Different species seemed to occupy their own place in the sonic spectrum. Insects in Borneo might stridulate loudly at a middle frequency, alternating so as not to drown each other out. Birds rise above it by calling at a higher pitch, and birds with shorter calls fit in-between the calls of birds with longer ones. Frogs puncture the droning insect noise with short, loud bursts, and mammals take the bottom frequencies. Organisms, Krause hypothesized, evolved to partition acoustic bandwidth, calling out at different frequencies and at different intervals to be heard over one another. Animals would also have to evolve to be heard over sounds like thunder, wind, and rushing rivers — sounds that Krause, working with ecologist Stuart Gage, called geophony. And in more recent history, animals must also adjust to anthrophony: the sounds of human civilization.
Krause called his idea the acoustic niche hypothesis, and it had a corollary. If organisms evolved to share the acoustic spectrum, maybe disruptions from pollution, development, invasive species, and other threats would result in gaps in the arrangement of sounds. In 1989, Krause found what he believes is evidence of such audible damage. The year before, he had taken a recording of a forest in the Sierra Nevadas. He returned after it had been selectively logged and found the soundscape almost silent.


The idea that you can hear environmental damage is evocative — Rachel Carson knew that when she chose the title Silent Spring — but as powerful as Krause’s Sierra Nevada recording is, there are other potential explanations. It could have been a La Nina year, Pijanowski says, causing the birds showed up later. There could have been landscape changes elsewhere on their migratory route. There was no control group, no uncut forest in the same area to measure against.
In the last several years, researchers armed with microphones and data-sifting algorithms have been trying to explore and build on Krause’s ideas. They’re using microphones to monitor biodiversity in Costa Rica and Australia, and a similar network is being established in Germany. Other researchers have diagnosed dying coral reefs by the sound, as various fish and crustaceans go silent.
Pijanowski believes he’ll be able to hear shifts in the soundscape as the climate changes. Insects, whose life cycles are driven by temperature changes, will emerge earlier, while birds and mammals, whose behavior is driven primarily by the length of the day, will remain the same. Amphibians are driven by both factors, so it’s unclear how they’ll respond. New species will invade warming regions, potentially adding their own calls or silencing those of native animals. "We will start to hear a reassembly of the soundscape as summer comes earlier," Pijanowski says.

Amandine Gasc and Matt Harris retrieve a Songmeter recorder and two cameras

Pijanowski is responsible for much of the field’s recent growth, both by giving a name to what disparate researchers were doing, and by convening many of those researchers in workshops. The last one was held in Maine — fittingly, near the Rachel Carson Wildlife Preserve — and drew a group of ecologists, biologists, musicians, engineers, artists, and philosophers.
"It’s still in its renaissance period," explained Tom Seager, an ecologist from Arizona attending the workshop. "Where both technologists and artists can contribute."
As a fledgling field, there was a lot of debate over terms and concepts, discussions that frequently ended up in philosophical territory. One such debate was over what to call noises that humans make.




"I no longer like the term anthrophony," Stuart Gage said as he walked through the forest listening to birds. A gray-bearded, soft-spoken former entomologist-turned-soundscape ecologist, Gage has a measured way of speaking and a saintly determination to neither use insect repellent nor to swat the swarms of mosquitoes battening onto him. If Krause is the godfather of soundscape ecology and Pijanowski its current evangelist, Gage is the bridge. He helped Krause come up with the taxonomy of sound in the early 2000s and advised Pijanowski on his thesis. "I’ve argued with Bernie a number of times that we ought to use the term technophony to distinguish sounds humans make from technological sounds — because humans are critters too, we communicate in the same way, with our voices. But we also make things."
Jeff Migliozzi, a teacher at the Perkins School for the Blind, agreed. "You’re essentially redefining man, saying instead of being a biological creature, we’re creators of technology, and the rattle and the hum."
"Maybe that’s true," said Gage.
A model of different forms of sound and silence by Tim Mullett, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
A model of different forms of sound and silence in the Kenai Wildlife Refuge by Tim Mullett, University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
Out on the estuary, Pijanowski was checking a recorder he’d set up in May. It had captured the pounding surf, shrieking gulls, sparrows, crickets, and hawks. The tides set the rhythm: high tide was silent and low tide cacophonous, as the birds swooped down to devour animals trapped in the tide pools. There was a rhythm to the technophony too, a dawn chorus of diesel engines as fishermen moved up and down the coast, weekly influxes of jets and speedboats, heavier on the weekends and increasing into summer.
The issue of mechanical noise was a major theme of the workshop, and of soundscape ecology in general. Falk Huettmann from the University of Alaska Fairbanks projected a noise map of the Kenai Wildlife Refuge made by his graduate student Tim Mullett. Mullett had traveled deep into the glacial refuge to set up microphones, going high into the mountains dozens of miles from the nearest road. He still found mechanical noise everywhere, mostly from airplanes and snowmobiles.
Speaking grimly in a German accent, Huettmann declared, "We need to abandon the idea of wilderness. It doesn’t exist."

Mechanical noise impacts different animals in different ways. In some cases — sonar and marine mammals, to name one — it’s disorienting and damaging. In others, animals adapt in ways we’re just beginning to understand. Grasshoppers that live near roads evolve to call at a higher pitch, to be heard over traffic noise. Even when taken to a silent room in a lab, they stridulate at a higher frequency than more rural grasshoppers, which makes sense — only grasshoppers that can be heard above the cars would find a mate.
"We need to abandon the idea of wilderness. It doesn’t exist."
There seems to be variation in how birds respond to noise. In 2003, researchers found that great tits (a bird) living in loud parts of the Dutch city of Leiden called at a higher pitch than tits in quiet parts. Urban robbins, meanwhile, appear to call at night not because they’re confused by city lights, as previously thought, but because they want to avoid the noisy day. Another researcher found that responses to noise varied depending on the species: one bird, the gray flycatcher, fled areas where gas drillers were using noisy air compressors, while ash-throated flycatchers simply called at a higher frequency. Sharon Gill, a biologist at Western Michigan University who was at the workshop, is studying how individual chipping sparrows respond to noise. Her initial findings indicate that there’s great variation in how individuals react, with sparrows with deeper calls raising their pitch more drastically to be heard over the sound of traffic.
"I’m really interested in the persistence of species in a changing world," Gill says. "This isn’t the environment these animals evolved in, with these high levels of noise."

False color spectrogram Australia
The sound of nine months in the Australian bush, modeled by Michael Towsey of the Queensland University of Technology. The white lines represent dawn and dusk.

Soundscape ecology’s current challenge is finding a way to sort through the vast amounts of data being collected. In just a few years, Pijanowski’s lab has accrued tens of thousands of hours of audio.
There’s no way anyone could listen to all this audio, so algorithms need to sort through it. Current methods are somewhat crude. Gage’s index takes everything at a frequency below 2 kilohertz and labels it human, then quantifies the acoustic energy in the ranges above that. It’s roughly accurate, but certain animals, like the loon, call at a low frequency. Another method sorts sound by its shape on a spectrogram. Animal sounds are generally short and sharply peaking, whereas machines tend to drone at a constant level. Again, though, it’s not always true — think of crickets in the summer, or the aquatic bang of the air guns used in undersea oil and gas exploration. Machine learning could help correct these issues, though that research is just beginning.
Computer scientist Michael Towsey in Brisbane, Australia, is taking a visual approach, using multiple indices to create color-coded images of soundscapes. The idea is that a trained ecologist could look at the charts of sound over the course of a day, month, or year and identify changes, like an acoustic weather map.
The hope is that an algorithm with the right index will parse the audio ecologists are collecting, turning low-cost microphones into a powerful network of sensors. With a way to quickly digest audio, researchers would have a vast array of data on what species are where and when, data that over time could provide a valuable glimpse into the way the environment is changing.
"I looked for most of my scientific career for an instrument that would measure the environment," Gage says. "I use the analogy of a stethoscope. A doctor can use a stethoscope to tell 10 different things about your heart. We’re holding a stethoscope up to nature. We’re listening to the heartbeat of the environment, whether it’s the heartbeat of a city or the heartbeat of a forest, it’s the heartbeat of the biosphere."

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3 Children Whose Stories Support the Case for Reincarnation

August 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Past-life recognition in children is being studied extensively by various scientists and psychiatrists around the world to prove the survival of consciousness beyond the physical realm.Reincarnation research was advanced by Dr. Ian Stevenson in the 1960’s, who interviewed thousands of people who had recollections of past lives. Dr. Stevenson discovered that recollection of past lives by children was much more common than many expected and he developed categories to help scr [...]

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