As Haiti reels from yesterday’s massive earthquake and its continued aftershocks, and nations rush to put rescue efforts together, scientists analyzing the seismic event say this disaster may have been a long time coming.

The earthquake in Haiti had a preliminary magnitude of 7.0 and it appeared to have occurred along a strike-slip fault, where one side of a vertical fault slips horizontally past the other, scientists say [AP]. This fault, called the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault, may have been slowly building up pressure since the major 1760 earthquake that struck Haiti.

“It’s been locked solid for about the last 250 years,” said Dr Roger Musson from the British Geological Survey (BGS). “It’s been gathering stress all that time as the plates move past each other, and it was really just a matter of time before it released all that energy” [BBC News]. Chillingly, scientists led by Paul Mann warned just two years ago that such a massive quake could strike Hispaniola, the island Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic. But there wasn’t much the impoverished Caribbean nation could do with that information, Mann said: “The problem with these kinds of strikes is that they can remain quiescent — dormant — for hundreds of years,” he said Tuesday evening. “So it’s hard to predict when they’ll occur” [CNN].

The BBC reports that the fault system of which Enriquillo-Plantain is a part normally moves less than an inch per year as the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates slide by each other, but this earthquake may have caused the earth’s surface along the fault line to offset by as much as three feet.

The fact that the Enriquillo-Plantain appears to have released all its fury at once raises further worry for people living near strike-slip fault zones—California’s San Andres fault also falls under this category. However, Caribbean geology expert Grenville Draper says that the Hispaniola fault system doesn’t behave exactly like California’s. The movement along the Hispaniola fault is relatively small compared with plates moving underground in California, Draper said. The effect would be less-frequent earthquakes, but relatively large ones when they do occur [Miami Herald].

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Image: Wikimedia Commons / The Weatherman

Are the world’s most popular search engine and the world’s most populous country headed for a breakup? That’s the word reverberating around the Internet today after Google said it would no longer put up with the Chinese government’s demands to censor the Internet and the rampant hacking attempts against it, which could result in the company ending its Chinese operations.

The announcement came as a stunning reversal for Google, which had capitulated to the government’s wishes to gain access to China’s fast-growing population of Internet users. Since arriving in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what can be read online [The New York Times].

The standoff comes as no surprise to China watchers, however. “The idea that Google would be allowed to run an uncensored search engine would be inconsistent with everything the Chinese government has done and every single statement it has made over the past year” about the need for controls on the internet, says Rebecca MacKinnon, an expert on new media in China [Christian Science Monitor]. In fact, the news of this fight over censorship remains itself censored in China, The New York Times reports. Early reports in the Chinese news media mentioned terms like “free speech,” but those quickly disappeared.

The details of Google’s other grievance—China-based hacks against it—haven’t all come to light yet. But these sophisticated attacks against more than 30 firms, mostly Silicon Valley-based, appear to have targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese humans right activists. Perhaps that was the last straw for Google; an anonymous source told Wired.com that the company already deals with the Chinese government harassing its own people over there. “[Google is] really concerned about their safety and feels that there is a very real possibility that they will be interrogated,” the source said. “They have been [interrogated] numerous times before, and this time they could be arrested and imprisoned” [Wired.com].

What happens if Google actually breaks with Beijing? Baidu, China’s number one search engine, will benefit, but it won’t be the only one. “With the easing of competition from Google, it’s actually going to benefit everybody. The small operators now see an opportunity to gain some market share,” said Elinor Leung, an analyst at CLSA. [Wall Street Journal]. But what’s good for the market share of Chinese search engines may not be good for Chinese Internet users. Google’s pullout could hamper the fight for Web freedom there and elsewhere, leaving governments with even more power to set the rules about how much of the Internet people within their borders can see.

That’s if Google follows through on its threat and ends its Chinese operations. As the Wall Street Journal reports, an Irish betting site is already taking wagers whether the company will do it by 2012, and the odds aren’t good—the bookies seem to think China is too tempting a market to surrender.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons / M. Weitzel

My latest Science Progress blog post looks at the case of a recent Science paper that has had a dramatic impact on the debate over so-called “MTR”–an extremely destructive and invasive form of mining that literally takes the caps off of mountain peaks to access the coal inside them. In essence, it’s the story of scientists being willing to stand up and say what they think about policy, and having a real influence as a result–a case study in how to make scientific information have its maximal impact. An excerpt:

To me, the most intriguing question is this: How did the 12 environmental scientists on the Science paper managed to achieve such an impact? Did they plan for it, or was it just fortuitous?

So I called up Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the article’s lead author. I was something like her 30^th media interview on the topic, but unlike other journalists, I didn’t want to ask about either the policy or the science of MTR. Rather, I inquired about the communication strategy that had been employed to disseminate news about her paper. And thus unfolded a striking story of a group of scientists, with extremely important research on their hands, doing everything pretty much right to ensure its maximal impact.

As Palmer explained, the project out started as pure science. Her team of researchers began by synthesizing a wide array of data from different scientific fields on the consequences of MTR, in a more thorough way than had ever been done before—a process that consumed many months in the peer review process. But as the truly alarming results started to manifest, members of the scientists’ group soon coalesced around a strong, unanimous position about what they were finding. “Rather than just reporting the science,” says Palmer, “we all agreed that the consequences were so huge, we were very comfortable saying, ‘This just has to stop.’”

Resolved upon its message, the team then sought to disseminate it….

To hear more of the story, you can read the full post here.

A polymorphism of the ability to smell urinary metabolites of asparagus.

Face it: your pee smells after you eat asparagus. (And if you think yours doesn’t, it’s because you can’t smell it.) This phenomenon (which is caused by various malodorous sulfur-containing compounds) has tickled the fancies of many researchers, as well as such luminaries as Proust, who wrote of asparagus: “exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, and whose precious essence when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting like a fairy-play by Shakespeare) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume (translated from Du côté de chez Swann, Gallimard, 1988, I, 119; I, 131).

But our favorite allusion to the asparagus-pee phenomenon has to be from Benjamin Franklin, who, in 1871 1781, wrote a letter asking researchers to come up with a solution to fart smells (the letter is definitely worth reading in full: To the Royal Academy of Farting):

“Certain it is also that we have the Power of changing by slight Means the Smell of another Discharge, that of our Water. A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a disagreable Odour; and a Pill of Turpentine no bigger than a Pea, shall bestow on it the pleasing Smell of Violets. And why should it be thought more impossible in Nature, to find Means of making a Perfume of our Wind than of our Water?”

So, now that we understand why our pee stinks when we eat asparagus, can we address Benjamin’s larger concern? Check back tomorrow for some cutting-edge research on fart-smell-reduction!