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Bizarro Earth

Mount St Helens is getting weirder

Maddie Stone
Gizmodo
Wed, 02 Nov 2016 02:17 UTC
Mt. Saint Helens
© Wikimedia Commons
A plume of steam and ash billowing out of Mt. Saint Helens in 1982, two years after the most destructive eruption in US history.
Picture a volcanic eruption: fiery lava and smoke billowing skyward as a towering mountain empties its over-pressurized belly of a hot meal. At least, that's how most of us think it works. So you can imagine volcanologists' surprise when they discovered that Mount St. Helens, which was responsible for the deadliest eruption in US history, is actually cold inside.

Apparently, it's stealing its fire from somewhere else.

Mount St. Helens is one of the most active volcanoes of the Cascade Arc, a string of eruptive mountains that runs parallel to the Cascadia subduction zone from northern California to British Columbia. It's also one of the strangest. Most major volcanoes of the Cascade Arc sit neatly along a north-south line, where the wedging of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate beneath the North American plate forces hot mantle material to rise. Mount St. Helens, however, lies to the west, in a geologically quiescent region called the forearc wedge.

"We don't have a good explanation for why that's the case," said Steve Hansen, a geoscientist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Seeking answers, Hansen recently led a seismic mapping survey of Mount St. Helens. In the summer of 2014, his team deployed thousands of sensors to measure motion in the ground around the volcano. Then, they drilled nearly two dozen holes, packed the holes full of explosives, triggered a handful of minor quakes, and watched as seismic waves bounced around beneath the mountain. "We're looking at what seismic energy propagates off in the subsurface," Hansen explained. "It's a bit like a CAT scan."
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Monkey Wrench

More GMO contamination: Genetically modified wheat could be grown in Britain beginning next Spring

Sarah Knapton
The Telegraph
Fri, 04 Nov 2016 17:09 UTC
GMO wheat
© The Telegraph
GM wheat trials could begin next year
Genetically modified wheat could be grown in Britain from next spring after scientists applied to the Department for the Environment for permission to begin trials which could boost grain yields by up to 40 per cent, in a 'world's first' experiment.

Researchers at the universities of Essex, Lancaster and Rothamsted Research have proven that it is possible to engineer wheat plants so they photosynthesise more efficiently, and so produce bigger grains.

Greenhouse tests have already shown it is possible to grow GM plants which have yields which are up to 40 per cent higher than usual crops, but now scientists are keen to find out whether the same effect can be achieved in the field.

If successful it would mark a 'step change' in wheat production and silence the critics who claim genetic modification will never increase yields following 20 years of failed attempts.

Comment: GMOs are NOT the future of food
Organic agriculture's recently recognized benefits for improving food security don't depend on a boost from genetically modified (GM) technology. While the chemically-based systems that GM requires could be cleaned up with organic techniques, there's no clear reason to degrade organic standards to accept the downsides that come with biotech-produced crops as they are currently managed.

Recently, there have been renewed efforts to pressure organic agriculture to abandon one of its foundational principles and accept genetically modified crops. While there may be nothing inherently wrong with contemplating a theoretical overlap between biotech crop genetics and organic farming systems, there's not a compelling set of reasons to do so, either.
  • GMO's: The "Sound Science" of deception

    So, people are hungry because there is not enough food. "Sound science" and technology are needed to grow more food and the owners of the seed patents, proprietary chemicals, the grain processors and meat packers will give the technology and food to those who need it? Sure.

    People are hungry because they are poor and they are poor because the corporate system has outsourced their jobs, ruined their local economy and taken their land away.

    Farmers cannot feed people when seeds are patented and cost more than they are worth.

    Farmers cannot feed people when the crop protection chemicals they must use poison the water and the air.

    Farmers cannot feed people when local markets are destroyed by a global food system and when the "sound science" they are told will make them profitable and help them feed the hungry turns out to be a lie.

    GMO's are safe and they hold the promise of feeding the world. Really? On very rare occasions the "sound science" gets debunked by those behind the science.
    GMO's will not feed the world "If anyone tells you that GM is going to feed the world, tell them that it is not... To feed the world takes political and financial will." - Steve Smith, head of GM company Novartis Seeds UK (now Syngenta), public meeting on proposed local GM farm scale trial, Tittleshall, Norfolk, UK, 29 March 2000.


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Map

Japanese 'origami' cartography leaves design world spinning - world map accurate in 2D and 3D


RT
Thu, 03 Nov 2016 07:10 UTC
authagraph map

How the world looks flat.
A Japanese artist has put cartography back on the design map by creating a near perfect chart of the world - a spherical globe that can be un folded into a flat rectangular map without distorting the size of continents or oceans.
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Cow Skull

Using gene editing - scientists develop a hornless Holstein dairy cow

Julia Franz
pri.org
Sun, 30 Oct 2016 00:00 UTC
dairy cows
© Pascal Rossignol/Reuters
Through "genetic editing," Holstein cows, whose horns are usually removed on farms, will be born hornless.
If you've visited a dairy farm, you may have noticed that the cows — usually Holsteins — are hornless. They weren't born that way: Both female and male Holsteins naturally grow horns. But on farms, the horns of dairy calves are often removed (an unpleasant process for the animals), so that the cattle won't pose a threat to one another, or the farmworkers handling them.

Now, a team of researchers at the University of California-Davis has come up with another way to remove the horns. By swapping in a gene from the naturally hornless (polled) Angus breed, the researchers created hornless Holsteins that are born that way. Is the polled Holstein a new type of cow — a genetically modified organism? Or are researchers just speeding up the breeding process?

"To me, this is precision breeding as much as anything," says Alison Van Eenennaam, an animal geneticist at UC Davis who led the research. "We're able to introduce a desired genetic variant [into Holsteins] very precisely, without affecting any of the other genetics that makes them great milk-producing animals."

Comment: The overlooked threats of gene editing
In reality, all genetic editing, especially when it alters the genetic material of subsequent generations, represents a potential threat to the genetic heritage of the entire planet with potential consequences we may still not fully understand. In a world where the "science is final" regarding humanity's impact on the planet's climate, demanding "urgent action" to stop or reverse it, the absence of a similar impetus behind stopping the contamination of our planet's genetic heritage seems suspiciously hypocritical if not utterly reckless and even intentional.

Of course, gene editing will be done, with or without the approval of governments and the people they govern. However, measures should be developed and put in place to preserve the natural genetic heritage of the planet, and such measures should be decentralized as much as possible.


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Blue Planet

Cosmic-ray detector finds possible crack in Earth's magnetic shield

Brooks Hays
UPI
Thu, 03 Nov 2016 00:00 UTC
Life itself has Earth's magnetosphere to thank, but as the latest research suggests, it's not a fail-safe shield.
Geomagnetic storms
© NASA/UPI
Geomagnetic storms can trigger incredible light shows. Here, charged particles can be seen exciting the gas in the upper atmosphere of the northern hemisphere.
The world's largest, most sensitive cosmic-ray detector has identified a potential crack in Earth's magnetic field.

The weakness was revealed by a burst of galactic cosmic rays, detected by GRAPES-3 during a severe geomagnetic storm in June 2015. The storm as triggered by a plasma cloud ejected from the sun's corona.

It was one of the largest geomagnetic storms in recent history, generating an intense aurora borealis and thwarting radio communication systems among the most northern latitudes. The storm was strong enough to compress Earth's magnetosphere for several hours.
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Satellite

NASA'S new asteroid alert system gives 5 days of warning

Evan Gough
Universe Today
Wed, 02 Nov 2016 00:00 UTC
Asteroid hitting earth
© Artist's illustration: NASA
A huge asteroid impacting Earth would be catastrophic, but we may face a greater danger from more numerous, smaller asteroids.
Everyone knows it was a large asteroid striking Earth that led to the demise of the dinosaurs. But how many near misses were there? Modern humans have been around for about 225,000 years, so we must have come close to death by asteroid more than once in our time. We would have had no clue.

Of course, it's the actual strikes that are cause for concern, not near misses. Efforts to predict asteroid strikes, and to catalogue asteroids that come close to Earth, have reached new levels. NASA's newest tool in the fight against asteroids is called Scout. Scout is designed to detect asteroids approaching Earth, and it just passed an important test. Scout was able to give us 5 days notice of an approaching asteroid.

Here's how Scout works. A telescope in Hawaii, the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) detected the asteroid, called 2016 UR36, and then alerted other 'scopes. Three other telescopes confirmed 2016 UR36 and were able to narrow down its trajectory. They also learned its size, about 5 to 25 meters across.

Comment:



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Galaxy

Fascinating similarity between human cells and neutron stars discovered

Josh Hrala
Science Alert
Thu, 03 Nov 2016 14:06 UTC
astronomy supernova
© NASA
Our link to the stars.

If you were to compare yourself to a neutron star, you probably wouldn't find very many things in common. After all, neutron stars - celestial bodies with super strong magnetic fields - are made from collapsed star cores, lie light-years away from Earth, and don't even watch Netflix.

But, according to new research, we share at least one similarity: the geometry of the matter that makes us.

Researchers have found that the 'crust' (or outer layers) of a neutron star has the same shape as our cellular membranes. This could mean that, despite being fundamentally different, both humans and neutron stars are constrained by the same geometry.

"Seeing very similar shapes in such strikingly different systems suggests that the energy of a system may depend on its shape in a simple and universal way," said one of the researchers, astrophysicist Charles Horowitz, from Indiana University, Bloomington.
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Satellite

NASA's most advanced telescope finally completed after 20 years


RT
Fri, 04 Nov 2016 13:19 UTC
Early full-scale model on display at NASA Goddard
© Wikipedia
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has finally been unveiled at NASA. The fruit of 20 years' labor, its 18 mirrors will peer further into space than any existing ground or space-based telescopes.

More than 20 years has been spent developing the machine, with its dazzling signature honeycomb look. The mirrors will correct infrared light and peer further into space than any of its contemporaries, including the Hubble Space Telescope, which the JWST succeeds.

"Today, we're celebrating the fact that our telescope is finished, and we're about to prove that it works," senior project scientist John Mather was cited by Space.com as saying on November 2, as the device was unveiled at NASA's Goddard Space Center in Maryland. "We've done two decades of innovation and hard work, and this is the result - we're opening up a whole new territory of astronomy."
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Robot

Researchers show how smart appliances are vulnerable to remote hacking


RT
Thu, 03 Nov 2016 18:51 UTC
remote hacking
© seyalr / YouTube
International researchers have demonstrated how simple it is to hack into internet-connected appliances, often called the 'Internet of Things.' As connected devices proliferate around the world, so does the risk of hacking attacks and disruptions.

Last month's massive distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack crashed or slowed down scores of major internet providers and services across the US. No information was compromised, but the disruption affected popular services such as Twitter and Spotify. The hacking group that claimed responsibility says it was a demonstration of vulnerability.

A new paper from cyber-security researchers at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science and Canada's Dalhousie University shows that malicious hackers could cause a "nuclear chain reaction" by hacking into 'smart' lightbulbs or other popular IoT household devices.

"The attack can start by plugging in a single infected bulb anywhere in the city, and then catastrophically spread everywhere within minutes, enabling the attacker to turn all the city lights on or off, permanently brick them, or exploit them in a massive DDOS attack,"wrote Eyal Ronen, Colin O'Flynn, Adi Shamir and Achi-Or Weingarten in the paper, titled IoT Goes Nuclear: Creating a ZigBee Chain Reaction.

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Hardhat

Oil production may have caused several of California's major earthquakes in early 20th century

Annie Sneed
Scientific American
Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00 UTC
1933 earthquake los angeles, oil production earthquakes
Southern California suffered a number of big earthquakes in the early 1900s, a pattern that prompted experts to declare the state an earthquake hazard. But new work shows some of the biggest temblors might have been caused by oil and gas production, not nature. The finding could ultimately change scientists' predictions for earthquakes in the Los Angeles Basin, and how well they understand man-made, or "induced," earthquakes around the country.

It is challenging enough for scientists to determine whether a modern-day quake is natural or induced, and even more so for one that occurred a hundred years ago. The tools they now use to measure earthquakes were not as sophisticated back then, and historic records are limited. So researchers Susan Hough and Morgan Page at the U.S. Geological Survey relied on a combination of old scientific surveys, crude instrumental data and newspaper accounts to piece together details of quakes in the early 20th century. "It's not as precise as having seismic data, but that doesn't mean it's hopeless," Hough says.
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