Discoveries
Paul the Octopus predicts that Spain will win the semifinal match in the 2010 World Cup against Germany by eating the mussel out of the box with Spain's flag on it. Paul has been 100 percent correct in his predictions for German match ups in this World Cup. (Mark Keppler/AP)
Germany hopes Paul the Octopus is wrong
UPDATE: Sorry Germany, Paul the Octopus is still flawless in his World Cup 2010 picks.
Paul picked Spain to beat Germany in their semifinal match earlier this week and the oracle animal is now six for six on his predictions for this year. After a scoreless first half, Spain's Carles Puyol nailed a header into the back of the German goal, giving the Spaniards a 1-0 lead.
Spain will now face the Netherlands in Sunday's final at Soccer City in Johannesburg. Despite his country's loss, Paul the Octopus will be allowed to predict the outcome of the championship game.
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For Germany's sake, Paul the Octopus had better be wrong.
On July 6, the prognosticating cephalopod predicted that Spain would defeat Germany in their semifinal World Cup match. And by "predicted" we mean "selected the mussel from the box with the Spanish flag on it."
So far, Paul has been phenomenal. The "psychic" octopus has correctly picked the outcome of all Germany's matches in the 2010 World Cup, calling all of their victories against Ghana, England, and Argentina, and their loss to Serbia.
IN PICTURES: Paul the Octopus predicts World Cup outcomes
The Germans are hoping however that Paul's prowess will come to a halt on Wednesday, when Germany faces Spain. The last time Paul predicted a match between these two teams, it was the finals of the European Championships in 2008. Paul picked Germany to win. He was wrong: Spain won 1-0.
But since then, Paul has not been wrong. He has an overall record of 9-1. "This is not a good omen," wrote Bild newspaper's online edition after the news of Paul's pick made its way across Germany.
A spokeswoman from Paul's home, Sea Life in Oberhausen, Germany, told Reuters, "To err is not only human - animals can also make mistakes. Let's hope Paul got this one wrong."
Animals in fact are often wrong, at least when it comes to prophesying the outcomes of soccer matches. Especially those in German zoos in this World Cup. At the Chemnitz Zoo, a female sloth bear, Renate, incorrectly picked Argentina over Germany on July 2.
Also at Chemnitz, a monkey named Tamarin Anton predicted that Ghana would beat Germany. Wrong. And a 19-year-old hippo named Petty predicted that Germany would beat Serbia. Wrong again. Paul the Octopus however, is five for five on his picks this year.
Paul himself could be hoping he made a mistake on this one. The Telegraph reported that Argentinean paella death threats for the octopus started to come in after the quarterfinal match between Argentina and Germany.
Argentina's newspaper El Dia said that, "All you need is four normal potatoes, olive oil for taste, and a little pepper," and Argentinean chef Nicolas Bedorrou also described on Facebook, in somewhat graphic detail, how he would like to kill and cook Paul the Octopus.
Win or lose however, Paul has his keeper, Oliver Walenciak, on his side. "There are always people who want to eat our octopus but he is not shy and we are here to protect him as well. He will survive, " Walenciak told the Telegraph.
Related:
- Spain, Germany face off on World Cup schedule Wednesday
- Germany vs Spain: Three reasons why Germany will win
- Spain vs Germany: Three reasons why Spain will win
Dog handler Christina Oberhauser and her rescue dog Smiley search for survivors in a snow hole during a simulated avalanche rescue operation in the Heutal Valley in Salzburg, Austria, on Feb. 26. During this simulation, rescue dogs learn how to find victims of avalanches as quickly as possible. (Kerstin Joensson/AP)
Take Your Dog to Work Day: Photos of dogs on the job
Take Your Dog To Work Day was created in 1999 to celebrate what good companions dogs are. The holiday is also meant to encourage the adoption of dogs from humane societies, animal shelters, and breed rescues. Take Your Dog To Work Day calls on employers to open their offices to employees' furry friends for the day.
But what would happen if Fido skipped out on his own job to accompany you on yours?
Bombs would go undetected.
The Monitor reported in March that the Thai military was continuing to use bomb detectors that were proven unreliable. The British-made scanner could not find explosives hidden in 4 out of 5 containers. We have some advice for the Thai military: Get a dog.
While humans have about 6 million smelling receptors in our noses, dogs can have over 300 million, Alexandra Horowitz note in her book "Inside of a Dog."
"Dogs have more genes committed to coding olfactory cells, more cells, and more kinds of cells, able to detect more kinds of smells," she writes.
So if you're planning on taking a plane somewhere or attending a concert or sporting event, you might want to send Fido to work instead.
Smuggling would go unchecked.
At a border, a canine team can inspect a vehicle in five to six minutes, as opposed to a human officer who can take as long as 20 minutes. Drug-detection dogs have been trained to find contraband such as marijuana, hashish, cocaine, heroin, and ecstasy.
In 2005, the US Customs and Border Protection began a dual-detection training program for a new class of dogs that could also detect concealed humans.
Livestock would go unherded.
If herding dogs went to the office instead of the pastures, farmers and livestock keepers would need more than one Babe to keep order. They'd call, "Away to me," "Cast," or "Come bye," and no dog would be there. It would be chaos. Sheep everywhere.
The official Take Your Dog To Work Day website describes how to prepare your dog for the office, advising that owners keep their dogs calm and "polite." This may be hard for your herding dog who may instinctively try to herd your coworkers as though they were sheep.
People would spend more time buried under debris.
Dogs are often used in search and rescue, sometimes to find a missing person, survivors in a disaster, or in avalanches, for example. In the recent flash floods in Arkansas and Brazil, cadaver dogs were brought in to help locate victims.
These canine teams performed duties similar to units that were in Haiti after the earthquake. "'Live-scent' dogs are arguably the most valuable tools rescue workers have in a disaster of this magnitude. These elite canines can climb and run across the piles of concrete and other debris in the streets of Port-Au-Prince and determine within three minutes if there are survivors buried below," the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation said.
Avalanche search-and-rescue dogs were on patrol at Whistler in British Columbia during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. The Canadian Avalanche Rescue Dog Association says that a search dog will need only 30 minutes to cover about two and a half acres of land. A human team would take almost four hours to search the same area.
Doorbells wouldn't be answered, and disabled vets would be lonelier.
Assistance dogs can fall into several categories, and they help people with everyday tasks. Guide dogs assist the blind. Hearing dogs can alert people to doorbells, smoke detectors, telephones, or alarms. Some service dogs can be trained to perform physical jobs such as turning on lights, opening doors, and pulling wheelchairs.
Therapy dogs are trained to provide attention and comfort to people in hospitals, retirement homes, and for those with post-traumatic stress disorder. Certified therapy dogs at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington help relieve stress, improve confidence, and provide companionship to disabled veterans.
Some kids would have a harder time learning to read.
Dogs are also used to promote and develop reading skills for children. For kids with learning disabilities, or who are reluctant to read aloud in front of peers, a therapy dog can be a non-judgemental audience for them to build confidence in reading aloud.
The war in Afghanistan could be compromised.
Fido may even be deployed overseas, and what better reason is there for missing Take Your Dog To Work Day?
As the number of troops being sent to Afghanistan increases with the troop surge, so too are the number of dogs serving. An American K-9 project manager for Afghanistan expects that the number of dogs on missions in Afghanistan could reach over 300. The LA Times reported that in on month alone, military dogs in southern Afghanistan made 20 finds of unexploded devices, weapons caches, and other materials.
The US military has the largest canine force in the world with 2,800 dogs currently serving.
So while having Fido at work might greatly benefit you and your employer - CNN reported that 75 percent of people surveyed said they would work longer hours if they could bring their dog to the office - a greater disservice to society would be done if working dogs skipped out on work Friday.
A Mongolian baby, Bayar, is seen here in the 'Babies' movie, a documentary from Focus Features. The film opens just in time for Mother's Day this weekend. (Focus Features/AP)
Watch out! The 'Babies' movie is here!
Just in time for Mother's Day, The Focus Features French documentary 'Babies' by Thomas Balmes opens at theaters this weekend. The film follows four babies – in San Francisco, Tokyo, Namibia, and Mongolia – from birth to their first steps, with mountains of diapers and oceans of drool in between.
Babies are everywhere
Did we forget a corner of the world in our gallery 'The Babies are coming?' From Burma to Macedonia to South Africa to Brazil to earthquake-stricken Haiti, there is a universality to babies.
Swaddled little hot dogs with chubby cheeks, wide eyes, and really cute feet.
IN PICTURES: Babies around the world
Related: 'Babies': movie review
Also factor in that distinctive baby smell that's part brand-new-life, and part Johnson & Johnson baby powder, the baby gurgle and squeal, and the taste of residual baby food after planting a large kiss on their faces.
And we can't forget about the baby wobble. Perhaps best portrayed by a YouTube clip of a toddler bopping Beyonce's Single Ladies music video, the baby wobble is one of nature's greatest dance moves.
It doesn't matter where they come from
Director Thomas Balmes told the Orlando Sentinel that he wanted the film to 'shift the perspective from us looking at the world from our point of view, to seeing it from the babies' point of view – how they see their world.' For Bayar in Mongolia, this includes watching a goat come and drink your bath water. With you still in the tub.
The Sentinel asked if, while filming, Balmes observed any "universal truths" of raising children:
"In the modern parts of the world," Balmes said, "we have tools - books and technology - to help raise kids."
"But as the film shows, a child in Mongolia can spend hours just watching the sky or a fly or the cat. He's the happiest child I have ever seen.
"And these babies were all loved by their families, loved in different ways. A loved baby has all the advantages, no matter where it grows up."
Always in the spotlight
Though photos of babies from around the world possess a universality too – many babies are seen held, comforted, or looking out at the world with a sense of wonder – they also illustrate the babies' individuality and the unique circumstances of where they live and what they encounter.
In Denver, Colo., a baby is at a Rockies game with her father, chilling in a Baby Björn and decked out in purple accessories. In China, an overdressed baby is plunked in a bag as its family waits for a train during the Chinese New Year holidays. A child in Haiti sits outside a makeshift tent at a camp for earthquake survivors, and a baby in Sierra Leone is weighed at a therapeutic feeding center.
The differences can be about as stark as an Anne Geddes photograph and photos of babies dressed as famous dictators by Danish-Norwegian artist Nina Maria Kleivan.
And a baby is a campaigning politician's greatest accessory. Politicians are constantly playing hot potato with babies at rallies, smiling and cooing at them in restaurants, and ticking away votes in their heads the whole time. Okay, well maybe not in George W. Bush's case.
But babies steal the show every time.
Two words: constant supervision
Improvising Fatherhood's blogger Nate Smith describes his son Chandler as 'spurting' from place to place with ninja powers. Turn your back and the crawling maniac is gone. In a second, he reappears underfoot. Smith swears he's seen his son in two places at once.
Balmes mentions that Bayar wanders into a herd of cows during the filming of 'Babies.'
It's universally known that you're not supposed to let babies out of your sight. But also that you can't save them from every bump, bruise, or wipeout. In the 'Babies' trailer, Ponijao is bitten by a sibling, Bayar falls backwards and dumps water on his face, and Mari in Japan face plants right in front of the camera while taking some of her first steps.
It's better to just have the camera ready.
IN PICTURES: Babies around the world
Related: 'Babies': movie review
Artist's rendering of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at Mars. The craft was launched Aug. 12, 2005 and arrived at Mars March 10, 2006. It's HiRISE camera has built a catalog of more than 12,000 images of the red planet. Scientists are using the images to reconstruct the planet's geologic history, trace the history of water on the planet, and provide detailed shots of potential landing sites for future missions. (NASA)
Ready, aim, click: Mars imaging team takes your requests
Scientists with NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter yesterday released the craft's first images of the Martian surface taken at the behest of everyday folks with a keen interest in the red planet.
It's an aspect of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission scientists started in January. It's called HiWish.
So far, only about 1 percent of the Martian surface has gotten the Ansel Adams treatment from the spacecraft's high-resolution camera. From its orbit, which ranges from 200 to 400 kilometers (125 to 250 miles) above the planet, HiRISE can spot objects as small as 1 meter across on the surface.
The HiRISE team has its ever-evolving science agenda, to be sure. But "we appreciate fresh thinking outside the box," notes Alfred McEwen, the lead scientist for HiRISE. Input from the public prompts his team to "look for things we may not have chosen otherwise."
IN PICTURES: NASA's HiRISE camera's public submissions
This isn't the first time scientists with NASA Mars missions have enlisted the public's help. During NASA's Mars Global Surveyor mission, for instance, that orbiter captured more than 1,000 images based on requests that came in from the public. Mars Odyssey has gathered another 500 images based on requests from the public suggestion box.
Ari Espinoza, an outreach coordinator for HiRISE's public-request program, notes that participants so far range from bona fide scientists to a retired school teacher with an abiding fascination with Mars. "We're really viewing this as the people's camera," Mr. Espinoza says.
If you're interested in taking part in setting HiRISE's research agenda, Espinoza -- a self-described HiRISE raconteur -- has a couple of pointers.
1. Check out the program's web site, which shows the sections of the planet people already have requested the team to image. Then, surprise surprise, don't request a repeat. Pick something different.
2. Provide some kind of rationale for your selection. You can find hints by reading other people's proposals. During a phone chat, we were discussing this when I asked about a couple of craters in one of the new images. The craters looked relatively recent. Or at least one could ask if they were. That's the kind of question one could cite as a rationale, he replied.
In Emily Lakdawalla's case, her nominee for a Kodak moment represented a bit of delayed gratification. She is an astronomer who blogs for Planetary Society, based in Pasadena, Calif. In 2001 she published her first and only peer-reviewed journal paper. It focused on a feature, Zephyria Tholus, that looked for all the world like a stratovolcano on Earth. Think Mt. Vesuvius, Mt. Rainier, or Mt. Fuji.
But, she writes in an email exchange, that feature also could have been carved by chance by several impacts. So she sought HiRISE's help in settling the question. The HiRISE team released her requested image as one of the first eight public-picked images.
And? "The image that we got back is very, very, very dusty, making it difficult to see the bedrock features that would answer my scientific question," she writes.
Oh well.
The scientific rationale on the request helps the HiRISE team set imaging priorities.
And, well, it helps weed out the travel photos. You know, the next great "tourist" snapshot of Valles Marinares. Yes, it's the largest canyon in the solar system. It's spectacular in the extreme. But for all the willingness for public participation on HiRiSE, that's no Canon Sure Shot on that orbiter! This is a serious piece of scientific hardware.
Oh yes, the "face" on Mars? Don't ask. Been there, shot that.
The Cassini Equinox Mission, the latest incarnation of the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, snapped this up-close-and-personal image of Calypso. The mission is a joint effort between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the European Space Agency. (NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)
Spuds in space: Saturn's moon Calypso sports that Ore-Ida look
The Cassini Equinox Mission strikes again with a fresh portrait released today of Calypso, one of the Saturn system's so-called Trojan moons.
Calypso's smooth surface, and its brightness, stem from the ice grains it sweeps up as it orbits within Saturn's E ring. The ice particles come from another Saturnian moon, Enceladus. Water erupts from fissures in the icy surface near the moon's south pole, feeding fresh ice particles to the E ring.
The moon has earned the "Trojan" tag because of its relationship with a much larger moon of Saturn, Tethys.
Astronomers originally gave the title to one of two groups of asteroids that orbit the sun at Jupiter's distance. The Trojans occupy a kind of gravitational no-man's land known as a Lagrange point. In this case, the point – a region of space, actually – is equidistant from the center of mass of the sun and of Jupiter. Jupiter has two of these types of Lagrangian points – one about 60 degrees in front of it as it orbits the sun, the other 60 degrees behind it.
In Calypso's case, it's orbiting Saturn at Tethys's distance and at a point equally distant from the center of mass of Saturn and of Tethys.
Cassini finished up its initial four-year science agenda in 2008. But with many miles left in the tank, NASA extended the craft's assignment through September 2010 and renamed it the Cassini Equinox Mission, because that extension coincided with Saturn's equinox, which occurs once every 15 years. Next up, a close encounter with Titan on April 5.
Silhouette of a newly discovered ancestor to T. rex. The maps indicate where Dinosaur Cove is today in Australia, and where the site would have been 110 million years ago as Australia was beginning to break away from Antarctica. (Roger Benson/Cambridge University)
Tiny T. rex relative down under? Good on ya!
It comes from a land down under, where dinos roamed and feet thundered...(with apologies to Men at Work).
Tyrannosaurus rex was one mean dude/dudette. But so far, the only evidence for T. rex and its ancestors has come from the northern hemisphere.
Now, a team of paleontologists reports finding the remains of an ancestor to T. rex at Dinosaur Cove, just west of Melbourne, Australia. The remains date to 110 million years ago. The researchers say the find is helping to shed light on the evolutionary line that culminated in T. rex and spanned some 100 million years.
The find, along with those from another coastal site at Inverloch, east of Melbourne, are opening a window on an assemblage of species that at the time lived above the Antarctic Circle and in a much colder climate than many people have associated with the thunder lizards.
The evidence in question for an early form of T. rex down south comes in the form of a fossilized hip bone some 30 centimeters (11.8 inches) long. According to Roger Benson, a Cambridge University paleontologist and member of the team reporting the find, the bone displays many features in common with T. rex's equivalent.
The team estimates that this T. rex wannabe was roughly 10 feet long and tipped the scales at 80 kilograms (about 176 pounds). T. rex, by contrast, stretched almost 40 feet nose to tail tip and weighed some four metric tons (8,800 pounds).
The bone "shows that 100 million years ago, small tyrannosaurs like ours might have been found worldwide," Dr. Benson said in a statement.
In a sense, the discovery -- drawn from fossils long exhumed but unstudied in the vaults at the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne -- could be expected, notes Paul Barrett, a paleontologist at the Museum of Natural History in London and another member of the team reporting the discovery in today's issue of the journal Science. Other so-called "northern" groups of dinosaurs have been appearing in southern hemisphere fossil beds.
The team's find "hints at the possibility" that the remains of other tyrannosaurids may be hiding in Africa, South America, and India as well.
And then there's the size issue. So far, it looks as though T. rex reached its ferocious proportions only in the northern hemisphere. If that remains the case as (or if) more southern tyrannosaurs come to light, it could prove an intriguing study in environmental or other factors that contribute to the rise of bigness in dinosaurs.
Artist's impression of a galaxy far, far, far away where new stars are forming. A phenomenon called gravitation lensing is allowing scientists to study features in this galaxy roughly the size of large clouds of dust and gas in the Milky Way. (ESO/M. Kornmesser)
Stunning views of star birth in a distant galaxy
A galaxy some 10 billion light years from Earth is – or was – producing stars at a prodigious rate. And Albert Einstein's gravitational "magnifying glass" has been giving astronomer's a front-row seat.
The galaxy in question: SMMJ2135-0102. It came to light as an international team of astronomers was observing a vast cluster of galaxies roughly 4.5 billion light years away. Their data revealed a very bright galaxy that appeared to be adjacent to the cluster. It was a galaxy no one had observed before.
The team measured the new galaxy's red-shift, a trait astronomers can use to estimate distance. Members were stunned to find the galaxy was more than twice as far away as the cluster they were studying. In effect, they were observing a galaxy in the form it had only about 3.5 billion years after the Big Bang, which formed the observable universe.
As Eintein's theory of general relativity predicted, the cluster's enormous gravity was bending light from the new galaxy behind it, turning the cluster into a vast magnifying glass. The lensing is strong enough to boost the apparent size of the new galaxy some 32 times.
The galaxy already was intrinsically bright because of the high rate at which new stars were forming in it. With magnification, the galaxy appeared brighter still.
"The magnification reveals the galaxy in unprecedented detail," notes Mark Swinbank, an astronomer at the University of Durham in Britain and a member of the team making the discovery.
The initial discovery was made with a European-run submillimeter telescope in Chile's Atacama desert. Follow-up observations at submillimeter wavelengths have allowed the team to study three large regions where vast clouds of dust and gas are acting as nurseries for new stars. Gravitational lensing, combined with the resolving power of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics' submillimeter array on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano, is revealing clouds a few hundred light years across – comparable in size to large clouds in the Milky Way.
Although the star forming regions the team has observed are about as large as those in the Milky Way, they are 100 times brighter, reinforcing the notion that star formation back then was far more vigorous than it is today.
Team member Steven Longmore, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., notes that more of these galaxies are likely to show up as astronomers conduct surveys of large regions of the night sky.
Studying additional galactic teenagers "will allow us to test exactly how generic our results are: Is the star formation occurring within galaxies in the early Universe always so vigorous? Or are we catching this particular galaxy at a very special time?" he said in a statement.
The team's results appear in the current issue of the journal Nature.
Academy of Art University students Lisa Allen, left, and Shaofu Zhang, right, take part in the California ShakeOut -- a statewide drop, cover, and hold earthquake drill in San Francisco in 2009. The USGS is experimenting with Twitter as a digital Paul Revere for earthquakes. (AP/File)
Earthquake alerts: shake, rattle, and Twitter
Earthquake scientists at the US Geological Survey are looking for ways to routinely use Twitter as an early source of information on a temblor.
What, you may ask? Twitter? That outlet for the banal in 140 characters or less? What value could that have for earthquake experts?
Geophysicist Paul Earle acknowledges that he was a bit skeptical of the idea, too. But there was no avoiding the fact that over the past couple of years, when an earthquake shook, Twitter tweeters were faster off the mark than the USGS in alerting the world that a quake had happened. The blogosphere was all over that discrepancy almost immediately, he told me during a phone chat, beginning with the disastrous quake in Wenchuan, China, in 2008.
IN PICTURES: Top Twitter moments
The comparison of the two systems, of course, is a bit unfair. The tweets often say nothing more than: OMG earthquake! Not a lot of information there to shape an emergency manager's response. When the USGS's email alerts go out on earthquakes worldwide, they contain much more information on the event -- magnitude, depth, location, for instance.
But, scientist that he is, Dr. Earle -- the operations director at the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo. -- said: Let's look at what Twitter can do and see if it can be useful. Those initial tweets could hold the potential to act as a "sanity check on what's going on," he says, giving seismologists an initial sense of how widely and intensely people felt the shaking. Tweets also could be a potential source of initial photos of damage and ground movement.
So, he turned a student working part time at the center loose on the task. He and colleagues set out their case study in the current issue of Electronic Seismology, a publication of the Seismological Society of America.
The team used a March 2009 earthquake in California as a test case. The quake's magnitude was 4.3. Searching Twitter, they pulled data on tweets from within about 120 miles from the earthquake's epicenter at Morgan Hill, Calif. The first tweet within that radius was posted 19 seconds after the event. Typically, formal alerts from regional and national seismic networks take from 1.5 to 20 minutes to hit the streets, depending on the location and magnitude of the quake.
Moreover, by taking advantage of Twitter's ability to gather information on a tweeter's location the team built a kind of shaking-intensity map based on the number of tweets posted from various places in the affected region.
The USGS already has a web-based mapping tool that residents can use to report the shaking, called Did You Feel It? But initial reports via Twitter beat out the initial DYFI entries by more than two minutes.
The study highlighted several challenges in using Twitter-based information. For instance, it was tough to tell an original tweet from a re-tweet. That could lead to a misleadingly high number of tweets from the quake area. The team also found tweets appearing at the same time as the Morgan Hill quake tweets, but they referred to computer games or ice-cream products with quake or earthquake in the name.
And location data came from the tweeter's online profile. The problem? Information from a New Yorker visiting the Bay Area and tweeting on the quake would look to the team as though the heads-up was coming from a quake that took place in New York. So the researchers had to find a away to spot and reject those miscues.
Since the study, however, Twitter has put original tweets and retweets on separate tracks, allowing a searcher to focus only on the originals. Moreover, the service now includes geographic coordinates in its tweet data, assuming a user is using a GPS-enabled cell phone or other mobile device and gives Twitter the OK to include those coordinates in its tweet database.
Earle's group is continuing to refine its use of twitter for early alerts, although the prototype system its developing is not ready for prime time publicly. And even if they prove useful as part of the USGS's formal alert system, they are no replacement for the kind of numerical information emergency mangers need to effectively respond to a quake.
Is there a real benefit to a system that can give folks at the Earthquake Information Center another minute or two's notice over a $200-million, high-tech global seismic network it relies on now?
Earle says yes. "As an earthquake responder, at the same time I would have received an email that had magnitudes and an epicenter for an earthquake, I'd have 100 short, personal accounts of what happened. Most of those will only say 'earthquake,' but others will say a little bit more." And once people know the USGS is taking this information vehicle seriously, they'll be more likely to exchange the one or two word tweet for something a bit more substantive, he says.
Given the big-buck investment in the global seismic network, "any time you can get an enhancement for the price of a part-time student, that's a pretty good deal," he says.
The NGC 2300 group of galaxies contains a large reservoir of million-degree gas glowing in X-rays. A false-color X-ray image of the hot gas is superimposed here on an optical picture of the galaxy group. Gravity from the galaxies alone is not enough to keep the gas in its place. There must be large quantities of dark matter whose gravity is preventing the gas from escaping. (NEWSCOM/FILE)
Dark matter revealed?
Dark matter, which scientists believe makes up 25 percent of the universe but whose existence has never been proven, could be detected by the giant particle collider at CERN, the research center's head said Monday.
Rolf-Dieter Heuer told a news conference some evidence for the matter may emerge even in the shorter term from mega-power particle collisions aimed at recreating conditions at the "Big Bang" birth of the universe some 13.7 billion years ago.
"We don't know what dark matter is," said Heuer, Director-General of the European Organization for Nuclear Research on the Swiss-French border near Geneva.
"Our Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could be the first machine to give us insight into the dark universe," he said. "We are opening the door to New Physics, to a discovery period."
Astronomers and physicists say that only 5 percent of the universe is known currently, and that the invisible remainder consists of dark matter and dark energy, which make up some 25 percent and 70 percent, respectively.
"If we can detect and understand dark matter, our knowledge will expand to encompass 30 percent of the universe, a huge step forward," Heuer said.
HIGHEST ENERGY
The LHC, the world's largest scientific experiment centered in a16.78 mile oval-shaped tunnel deep underground, is presently moving to colliding particles by the end of the month at the highest energy ever achieved.
These multiple collisions at a total of 7 tera-electron volts, or TeV, will each create mini-Big Bangs, producing data that thousands of scientists at CERN and in laboratories around the globe will analyze.
One widely publicized aim of the LHC is to try to find the theoretical particle that gave mass to the matter that spewed out after the primeval explosion and thereby made possible the emergence of stars, planets and eventually life -- on earth and perhaps elsewhere.
The mysterious particle has been dubbed the Higgs boson after the Scottish physicist who three decades ago proposed it to explain the origin of mass in the universe.
"We know everything about this particle. The only thing we don't know is if it exists," said Heuer, a German physicist who took over at CERN 14 months ago. "And if it does not exist, we are bound to find something that is very much like it."
Once collisions in the LHC are begun at 7 TeV, they will continue with only very brief breaks until the end of 2011, and then the machine will be shut down for a year to prepare it for years more of experiments at 14 TeV.
Related: Scientists chart dark matter halo that binds Milky Way
A mountain goat climbing harding icefield on Exit Glacier. Glaciers are becoming an increasingly important reference point in the debate over climate change. (NEWSCOM)
Glacier melting a key clue to tracking climate change
The world has become far too hot for the aptly named Exit Glacier in Alaska.
Like many low-altitude glaciers, it's steadily melting, shrinking two miles over the past 200 years as it tries to strike a new balance with rising temperatures.
At the Kenai Fjords National Park south of Anchorage, managers have learned to follow the Exit and other glaciers, moving signs and paths to accommodate the ephemeral rivers of blue and white ice as they retreat up deeply carved valleys.
IN PICTURES: Disappearing glaciers
"Some of the stuff is changing fast enough that we now have signs on moving pedestals," said Fritz Klasner, natural resource specialist at Kenai Fjords.
The vast amounts of water stored in glaciers play crucial roles in river flows, hydropower generation and agricultural production, contributing to steady run-off for Ganges, Yangtze, Mekong and Indus rivers in Asia and elsewhere.
But many are melting rapidly, with the pace picking up over the past decade, giving glaciers a central role in the debate over causes and impacts of climate change.
That role has come even more sharply into focus after recent attacks on the U.N.'s climate panel, which included a wrong estimate for the pace of melting for Himalayan glaciers in a major 2007 report.
The report said Himalayan glaciers could all melt by 2035, an apparent typographical error that stemmed from using literature not published in a scientific journal.
Climate skeptics seized on the error and used it to question the panel's findings on climate change.The evidence for rapid glacial melting, though, is overwhelming.
The problem is no one knows exactly what's occurring in the more remote Himalayas and parts of the Andes. Far better measurements are crucial to really understand the threat to millions of people downstream.
"There is no serious information on the state of the melting of the glaciers in the Himalayan-Tibetan complex," Kurt Lambeck, President of the Australian Academy of Science, told a climate science media briefing in late February.
The high altitude and remoteness of many glaciers in the Himalayas and Andes is the main reason.
DATA IN A DEEP FREEZE
To try to fill the gap, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said last month the government would establish a National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology in Dehra Dun in the north.
In Europe and North America, glaciers are generally more accessible and there are more trained people to study them. Switzerland's Aletsch glacier, the largest in the Alps, has been retreating for about 150 years. But the glacier, which feeds the River Rhone, still stores an estimated 27 billion tonnes of ice, according to www.swissinfo.ch.
IN PICTURES: Disappearing glaciers
That's about 12 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.In 2008, a total of 79 Swiss glaciers were in retreat, while 5 were advancing, the Swiss Glacier Monitoring network says.
"There are a very small number of glaciers that are monitored," said veteran glaciologist Ian Allison, pointing to less than 100 globally for which there are regular "mass-balance" measurements that reflect how much a glacier grows or shrinks from one year to the next.
Such measurements are the benchmark and several decades of data is regarded as the best way to build up an accurate picture of what's happening to a glacier.
Glaciers originate on land and represent a sizeable accumulation of snow and ice over the years. They tend to carve their way through valleys as more and more ice accumulates until the point where more is lost through melting than is gained.
THAT SHRINKING FEELING
"We probably know less about the total volume of glaciers than we do about how much ice there is in the big ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic because a lot of it is in small mass areas and a lot of it is inaccessible," said Allison, leader of the Australian Antarctic Division's ice, ocean, atmosphere and climate program.
The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland analyses mass balance data for just over 90 glaciers and says their average mass balance continues to decrease.
Since 1980, cumulative thickness loss of the reference glacier group is about 12 meters of water equivalent, it says in its latest 2007/08 report. Estimates vary but glaciers and mountain caps could contribute about 70 cm (2.3 feet) to global sea levels, a 2009 report authored by Allison and other leading scientists says.
The "Copenhagen Diagnosis" report from the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales says there is widespread evidence of more rapid melting of glaciers and ice-caps since the mid-1990s.
That means run-off from melting glaciers and ice-caps is raising sea levels by 1.2 millimeters a year, translating to up to 55 cm (1.8 feet) by 2100 if global warming accelerates.In Nepal, the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development says "mass-balance" measurements would provide direct and immediate evidence of glacier volume increase or decrease.
"But there are still no systematic measurements of glacial mass balance in the region although there are promising signs that this is changing," the center said in a recent notice.
It said that based on studies, the majority of glaciers in the region are in a general condition of retreat.
"Small glaciers below 5,000 meters (16,500 feet) above sea level will probably disappear by the end of the century, whereas larger glaciers well above this level will still exist but be smaller," it said.
Glaciers have almost vanished from New Guinea island and in Africa and many on Greenland, the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica are also melting quickly, dumping large amounts of ice into the sea.
BAMBOO STICKS
Part of the problem is that glaciers are fickle things to measure, said Allison, and requires legwork and lots of bamboo stakes.
IN PICTURES: Disappearing glaciers
These are placed in holes top to bottom, a potentially dangerous job, although satellites and lasers fitted to aircraft are changing this.
After a year or so, stakes placed up high will have had snow build up on them, so you can estimate how much snow fell there.Those down low will have lost mass due to melt and evaporation, so there would be more of the canes sticking out.
"So you can measure how much height is lowered down below, how much it's gained up top. You'll need to know the density of the snow and ice as well," Allison said.
But he said glaciers in one region can all apparently behave differently in response to the same climate signal.
"Because the fluctuations that occur in the front depend on how long it takes to transfer the mass from the top of the glacier to the bottom."
"You might have an area where all the small glaciers are all rapidly retreating but big glaciers still coming forward because they are still integrating changes that happened maybe 50 years ago," he added.
For the millions that live downstream, it is the impacts that are of most concern and among them is the threat of sudden bursting of lakes created as glaciers retreat.
About 14 of the estimated 3,200 glaciers in Nepal are at risk of bursting their dams.Ang Tshering Sherpa, from Khumjung village in the shadows of Mount Everest, said the Imja glacial lake could burst its dam anytime and wash away villages.
"When I was a child I used to take our yaks and mountain goats for grazing on grassy flat land overlooking Everest," Sherpa said."What was a grazing ground for yaks in 1960 has now turned into the Imja due to melting of snow," Sherpa, now a trekking and climbing entrepreneur, said in Kathmandu.
A glacial lake broke its dam 25 years ago destroying trekking trails, bridges and a hydroelectric plant in the region. Neighbouring Bhutan also faces the threat of bursting dams.
Just how much water melting glaciers contribute to major rivers such as the Ganges and Brahmaputra, though, remains unknown.
Richard Armstrong, a senior scientist of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, said it was nonsense to think that if glaciers melted there would be no water in the Ganges, a lifeline for millions in northern India.
"Even if the glaciers disappeared tomorrow it wouldn't have a huge impact on the water supply. The rest of the river flow comes from rain and melting seasonal snow."
He said the center has put in a proposal to NASA to use satellite data to build a better picture of the area and altitude of glaciers in the Himalayas.
"What we want to look at is what's the contribution of melting glacier ice to the downstream hydrology," Armstrong said. "It's really what's of primary importance to the socio-economic impacts of retreating glaciers."
Allison and Armstrong and many other scientists have dismissed the row over the U.N. climate panel error as overblown but said it served as a useful reminder of the gaps in global glacier monitoring and the need for a far better picture."It certainly brought attention to the problem," said Armstrong.
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