Tom Lowe has done it again: another jaw-dropping astronomy timelapse.

Timescapes: “Death is the Road to Awe” from Tom Lowe @ Timescapes on Vimeo.

Wow, that’s simply stunning. The music is beautiful and driving, too; it’s from "The Fountain", a movie I quite enjoyed.

My favorite was the cactus with the Pleiades, Orion, and Sirius behind it. But the whole thing is devastatingly beautiful. You should watch the other short films he’s made, too!

Six days after ash from Iceland’s volcano paralyzed European airspace, aviation experts and academics are arguing over whether the entire mess could have been avoided.

Ash from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano started to spread across North European skies last week, grounding thousands of domestic and long-haul flights and causing an estimated $1 billion in losses. Today the European Union attempted to get the continent moving again and reopened certain routes, giving millions of stranded passengers a chance to head home and throwing a lifeline to airlines that were hemorrhaging an estimated $250 million a day.

However, this grounding of flights drew sharp rebuke from Giovanni Bisignani, director general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), who argued that the entire mess could have been avoided had the airlines focused on facts and figures on actual damage caused to jet engines by volcanic ash, saying: “Europe was using a theoretical mathematical approach and this is not what you need. We needed some test flights to go into the atmosphere and assess the level of ashes and take decisions” [Reuters]. Unsurprisingly, the European Union’s transit officials have replied that they’re not willing to compromise on passenger safety.

Airlines canceled flights to and from Europe because the silicate particles in volcanic ash are known to create a glass-like coating inside airline engines when they fly through ash clouds. In 1982, almost 800 passengers on a British Airways flight had a narrow escape when the plane lost power in all four engines after flying though an ash cloud over the Indian Ocean. Not willing to risk a repeat of that terrifying incident, the European Union shut down flight routes last Thursday. NATO also limited military exercises after volcanic glass built up in fighter engines.

However, British Airways and Air France-KLM say they have both operated test flights in the region since the eruption, and they report that they encountered no problems due to the ash. Bisgnani argues that this proves that the governments made a mistake imposing a “blanket ban” on air travel in northern Europe. He said decision-makers should consider setting up “corridors” to repatriate the estimated 7 million passengers stranded across the globe [Reuters].

But atmospheric scientists explain that volcanic ash clouds pose a very tricky threat to pilots, who can’t see the clouds of tiny particles. They say that instruments could be installed on airplanes to help pilots detect large concentrations of ash as they fly–the instrument’s warnings would prompt the pilot to drop down to a lower altitude to steer clear of the ash. However, not many of these expensive, specialty detectors currently exist.

Experts add that there’s no guarantee that switching altitudes would give the pilot the all-clear, as changing wind conditions could move the ash to lower altitudes, too. Says aviation engineer Stewart John: “You could think that you’re safe flying along at 20,000 feet rather than up at 40,000 where the ash is, only to find that the wind has suddenly dropped and the ash is now at 20,000 feet” [Reuters].

Bisignani, meanwhile, argues that there needs to be consensus on what constitutes a safe concentration of ash. Aviation consultant Chris Yates says the volcanic ash guidelines were drawn up by a UN body, the International Civil Aviation Organization. Regulations for grounding the flights to protect them from volcanic ash, Yates says, were based on “experience gained from over 80 incidents between 1980 and 2000 and computer modeling (or) best guestimate” [Reuters].

Related Content:
80beats:In a Warmer World, Iceland’s Volcanoes May Get Even Livelier
Visual Science: Up Close and Personal With Iceland’s Volcanic Eruption
80beats:Icelandic Volcanoes–Disrupting Weather & History Since 1783
80beats: Volcanic Eruption in Iceland Causes Floods, Shuts Down European Air Travel
Bad Astronomy: Iceland Volcano Eruption Making an Ash of Itself
DISCOVER: Disaster! The Most Destructive Volcanic Eruptions in History (photo gallery)

Image: Wikimedia

A reminder to everyone: tomorrow I moderate a really cool panel of astronomers, where we’ll be discussing the search for Earths orbiting other stars. The original post is below. You can submit questions to the panelists, too!

I am very pleased and excited to announce that I will be moderating a fascinating panel in Pasadena California on Wednesday, April 21. The topic is "The Quest for a Living World": how modern astronomy is edging closer to finding another Earth orbiting a distant star.

[Click for a higher-res version.]

The panelists are all-stars in the field: Caltech astronomy professor John Johnson, Berkeley astronomer Gibor Basri, MIT planetary astronomer Sara Seager, and NASA Ames Research Center’s Tori Hoehler. We’ll be talking about how we’re looking for these new worlds, what the state of the art is, and perhaps toss around some of the philosophy of why we’re looking for them. You might think the answer is obvious, but I’ve found that astronomers have lots of intriguing reasons for why they do the work they do.

The event is sponsored by Discover Magazine, the Thirty Meter Telescope (yes, a project to build a telescope with a 30 meter mirror!), and Caltech. It will be at 7:30 p.m. at Caltech’s Beckman auditorium. It’s also free! Send an email to exoplanets@tmt.org if you want to attend.

We’ll be taking questions from the audience, and if you have a question you’d like to submit in advance then we have an online form where you can send it.

Last year’s panel on astronomy frontiers was a lot of fun, and very well-attended. If you’re in the LA area, then I highly recommend you come! I know you’ll have a great time, and you’ll get a taste for some of the astronomical adventures in store for us in the next couple of years.

The book that caused all the ruckus--relentlessly bashed by New Atheists, praised by the president's science adviser and the National Science Teachers Association--is set for its second run, this time with a new introduction that responds to critics and extends the argument. In paperback, Unscientific America officially comes out June 8, and can be preordered online now. So if you missed the hardback, here's your second chance. We'll have more soon about the book, but we wanted to let you know now...to get ready.

You don’t have to look very far to find a multi-million pound industry supported by the scantiest of scientific evidence. Take “brain-training”, for example. This fledgling market purports to improve the brain’s abilities through the medium of number problems, Sudoku, anagrams and the like. The idea seems plausible and it has certainly made bestsellers out of games like Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training and Big Brain Academy. But a new study by Adrian Owen from Cambridge University casts doubt on the claims that these games can boost general mental abilities.

Owen recruited 11,430 volunteers through a popular science programme on the BBC called “Bang Goes the Theory”. He asked them to play several online games intended to improve an individual skill, be it reasoning, memory, planning, attention or spatial awareness. After six weeks, with each player training their brains on the games several times per week, Owen found that the games improved performance in the specific task, but not in any others.

That may seem like a victory but it’s a very shallow one. You would naturally expect people who repeatedly practice the same types of tests to eventually become whizzes at them. Indeed, previous studies have found that such improvements do happen. But becoming the Yoda of Sudoku doesn’t necessarily translate into better all-round mental agility and that’s exactly the sort of boost that the brain-training industry purports to provide. According to Owen’s research, it fails.

All of his recruits sat through a quartet of “benchmarking” tests to assess their overall mental skills before the experiment began. The recruits were then split into three groups who spent the next six weeks doing different brain-training tests on the BBC Lab UK website, for at least 10 minutes a day, three times a week. For any UK readers, the results of this study will be shown on BBC One tomorrow night (21 April) on Can You Train Your Brain?

The first group faced tasks that taxed their reasoning, planning and problem-solving abilities. The second group’s tasks focused on short-term memory, attention, visual and spatial abilities and maths (a set that were closest in scope to those found in common brain-training games). Finally, the third group didn’t have any specific tasks; instead, their job was to search the internet for the answers to a set of obscure questions, a habit that should be all too familiar to readers of this blog. In each case, the tasks became more difficult as the volunteers improved, so that they presented a constantly shifting challenge.

After their trials, all of the volunteers redid the four benchmarking tests. If their six weeks of training had improved their general mental abilities, their scores in these tests should have gone up. They did, but the rises were unspectacular to say the least. The effects were tiny and the third group who merely browsed for online information “improved” just as much as those who did the brain-training exercises (click here for raw data tables).

By contrast, all of the recruits showed far greater improvements on the tasks they were actually trained in. They could have just become better through repetition or they could have developed new strategies. Either way, their improvements didn’t transfer to the benchmarking tests, even when those were very similar to the training tasks. For example, the first group were well practised at reasoning tasks, but they didn’t do any better at the benchmarking test that involved reasoning skills. Instead, it was the second group, whose training regimen didn’t explicitly involve any reasoning practice, who ended up doing better in this area.

Owen chose the four benchmarking tests because they’ve been widely used in previous studies and they are very sensitive. People achieve noticeably different scores after even slight degrees of brain damage or low doses of brain-stimulating drugs. If the brain-training tests were improving the volunteers’ abilities, the tests should have reflected these improvements.

You could argue that the recruits weren’t trained enough to make much progress, but Owen didn’t find that the number of training sessions affected the benchmarking test scores (even though it did correlate with their training task scores). Consider this – one of the memory tasks was designed to train volunteers to remember larger strings of numbers. At the rate they were going, they would have taken four years of training to remember just one extra digit!

You could also argue that the third group who “trained” by searching the internet were also using a wide variety of skills. Comparing the others against this group might mask the effects of brain training. However, the first and second groups did show improvements in the specific skills they trained in; they just didn’t become generally sharper. And Owen says that the effects in all three groups were so small that even if the control group had sat around doing nothing, the brain-training effects still would have looked feeble by comparison.

These results are pretty damning for the brain-training industry. As Owen neatly puts, “Six weeks of regular computerized brain training confers no greater benefit than simply answering general knowledge questions using the internet.”

Is this the death knell for brain training? Not quite. Last year, Susanne Jaeggi from the University of Michigan found that a training programme could improve overall fluid intelligence if it focused on improving working memory – our ability to hold and manipulate information in a mental notepad, such as adding prices on a bill. People who practiced this task did better at tests that had nothing to do with the training task itself.

So some studies have certainly produced the across-the-board improvements that Owen failed to find. An obvious next step would be to try and identify the differences between the tasks used in the two studies and why one succeeded where the other failed.

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09042