You may remember back in October that NASA scientists downgraded the threat of the asteroid Apophis slamming into the Earth from remote to even more remote. Thanks to refined computation of the object’s motion, astronomers changed their estimate of the chances for a 2036 collision from an already unlikely 1 in 45,000 chance to a further long shot of 1 in 250,000. Well, that wasn’t enough to ease the head of Russia’s space program, Anatoly Perminov, who today said his nation would plan an ambitious space program to spare the Earth from certain doom, and would eventually ask other world powers to join Russia on this quest.

Without mentioning NASA findings, Perminov said that he heard from a scientist that Apophis is getting closer and may hit the planet. “I don’t remember exactly, but it seems to me it could hit the Earth by 2032,” Perminov said [AP]. Truly, Perminov didn’t remember exactly: Apophis makes a close but harmless pass of our planet in 2029, when it could come within 20,000 miles of Earth, and then swings by again in 2036 (the visit for which NASA downgraded the danger to the remote four-in-a-million).

Despite his chronological uncertainly, Perminov was certain something must be done. “We are talking about people’s lives,” Perminov was quoted by news agencies as telling the radio station. “Better to spend a few hundred million dollars to create a system for preventing a collision than to wait until it happens and hundreds of thousands of people are killed,” he said [AFP].

Apophis, discovered in 2004, is almost 900 feet long. NASA originally estimated the chance of a 2029 impact at 2.7 percent—that being before its scientists had the opportunity to refine their math through further observations. They also expect the minuscule probability of 2068 Apophis collision, already listed at just 1 in 330,000, to diminish as they continue to learn about the object’s trajectory.

Perminov offers no hint as to how Russia plans to deal with Apophis, except to say it would not destroy the asteriod [sic]. “No nuclear explosions (will be carried out), everything (will be done) on the basis of the laws of physics,” he says [USA Today]. Russia is beginning its project in secret, he says, but despite failing to mention NASA’s numbers on the actual threat, he expects space experts from the United States, China, and elsewhere to join in on an international operation to save the planet.

Related Content:
80beats: Will NASA’s Next Step Be an Astronaut Rendezvous with an Asteroid?
80beats: Scientists Pick Up the Pieces (Literally) of an Asteroid Spotted Last October
DISCOVER: What To Do Before the Asteroid Strikes
Bad Astronomy: Apophis Danger Downgraded
Bad Astronomy: We’re All Doomed… Oh Wait, No We’re Not

Image: UH/IA

After 20 years in one spot, anyone can get restless. That goes for the famous sea lions of San Francisco’s Pier 39. They swelled to their largest population ever just a couple months ago and then almost totally disappeared this month, baffling local marine experts.

The animals have been a fixture on Pier 39 since 1990, when a big herring run lured the sea lions into San Francisco Bay. The Marine Mammal Center gets so many questions about the 1,000-pound creatures that the nonprofit staffs a small kiosk on Pier 39; the pier’s insignia includes the silhouette of a sea lion [San Francisco Chronicle]. In October more than 1,700 sea lions laid about on Fisherman’s Wharf. But the exodus began the day after Thanksgiving, and by yesterday only 10 remained hanging out near the docks.

Jeff Boehm of the Marine Mammal Center said the sea lions probably left in pursuit of a food source, the same reason they would’ve come to Pier 39 in the first place. But Boehm said the fact that so many sea lions stayed for so long is even stranger than their disappearance [AP]. That is, sea lions tend to travel far and wide rather than sticking it out in one place for so long.

Boehm and other scientists can’t say for sure why the lions picked this particular moment to depart, either. It’s an El Niño year in the Pacific, but the effects have been moderate, San Francisco’s weather has been close to normal, and other animals don’t seem to be affected. The marine scientists aren’t too worried about the sea lions’ welfare, since they’re typically travelers, and Boehm and company say the marine mammals could very well return next year.

That would be a consolation prize for organizers of the 20th anniversary celebration for Pier 39’s sea lions planned for Jan. 15; they saw their guests of honor bolt at the last minute. “The party will go on nonetheless,” said Sue Muzzin, a spokeswoman for Pier 39. “Well, I think it will” [The New York Times]. There are some people, though, who wouldn’t necessarily complain if the droves of sea lions never return: fisherman. One recently told a local radio station, “They’re cute when they’re in here lying on the docks by Pier 39, but they’re not too cute out in the ocean when they’re stealing your livelihood” [Wired.com].

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: Rio, the Logical Sea Lion

Image: Wiki Commons / Webaware

A healthy brain, with white matter tracts visualized with diffusion tensor imaging. Source.

You’re the only star in heaven
You’re the only star that shines
You’re the only star in heaven
Now that only star is mine
– Frankie Goes to Hollywood

Snuggler’s lament

These days of northern winter seem endless. It’s been brutally cold here in Boulder, causing much snuggling at night, both between humans and with Canises Major and Minor. Snuggling is fun, of course, but also useful: body heat shared is body heat doubled.

After a while it can get too hot, and even Mrs. BA with her ice cold feet will move away to cool off a bit. When that happens, of course, my mind turns to matters scientific. Our bodies generate a lot of heat. And with the Sun making only a desultory appearance every day, I was thinking recently about the energy generated by the Sun, versus that emitted by humans. I remember reading once that if you compare the heat coming a single square centimeter from the Sun to the same area on a human being, you’d find we actually put out more energy! As a skeptic I’m used to analyzing such claims; as a scientist I have the mad math skillz to work out the numbers; and as a communicator, I have the soapbox upon which I can talk about the whole thing.

So let’s get to it. Are humans more energetic than the Sun?

Yar, thar be math below, and plenty of it. Be ye fairly warned, says I.

Glowing places

As it happens, the math isn’t that hard. Objects that are warm (really, anything warmer than absolute zero) have a characteristic way they emit energy, called black body radiation. Both humans and the Sun are pretty close to being such radiators, and it’s not too bad to just assume they’re blackbodies. There’s a simple equation to calculate the amount of energy emitted per second, called the luminosity:

Luminosity = area of object x σ x temperature⁴

where σ, the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, is just a number (if you wanna check my math, it’s 5.67 x 10^-5 erg cm^-2 s^-1 K^-4, and K is Kelvins, the unit of temperature). That equation makes sense: at a given temperature, a bigger object will emit more energy. And if two objects are the same size, the hotter one will give off more energy (in other words, and to be a bit more vernacular, it’ll be brighter).

The Sun is big, so even if it were colder than a human it would win that fight! So we want to compare apples to apples here, taking one square centimeter of each and seeing who wins. That means we want the luminosity divided by the area, giving us the energy emitted per square centimeter in one second. Rearranging, we get

Luminosity / area = σ x temperature⁴

Hey, wait a sec! This makes something clear right away: if you want to compare the energy emitted per square centimeter from any two objects, all that matters is their temperatures. The hotter one wins.

That means the story I read — that humans emit more per square cm than the Sun — is wrong. The Sun is a lot hotter than a human, so it emits vastly more energy than a person does! In fact, it’s the ratio of the temperatures raised to the 4th power. The Sun’s temperature is 5780 Kelvins, and a human is 310 Kelvins. Plugging and chugging shows that the Sun gives off a whopping 121,000 times as much energy per square centimeter as a person does!

Yegads. And the Sun is a whole lot bigger. If you’re not careful, you may get the impression the Sun gives off quite a bit of energy.

Pump up the volume

A cubic Sun.

Anyway, far be it from me to simply say the story is wrong and drop it. There’s more science here! Instead of using the area, what about the volume? In other words, assume both a human and the Sun have the same temperature throughout (I mean, every chunk of a human is 310K, and the Sun is 5780 K). Would a cubic centimeter of the Sun outshine a cubic centimeter of human?

This is a little bit tougher to calculate. We need the total luminosity of the Sun and its volume, and the same for a human. For the Sun that bit’s actually easy, since we just use that luminosity equation above (knowing the Sun’s area is 6.1 x 10²² square centimeters, which I leave up to you to calculate if you want). The Sun’s energy emitted per second is then about 4 x 10³³ ergs/second, where an erg is just a unit of energy astronomers like to use. It’s a small unit, but 4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them is still a lot.

What about a human? Well, we need the area of a human to plug into the equation to get the luminosity, and we’ll have to estimate that. Let’s use me as an example, and assume I’m a big rectangular solid, like a shoebox (or a monolith). I’m 177 cm tall, about 50 cm across, and about 15 cm deep. That gives me an area of very roughly 25,000 square centimeters. That’s an estimate, but good enough — it won’t matter if I’m off by a factor of two either way.

Plugging away, I get that my luminosity is then 1.3 x 10¹⁰ ergs/sec. That’s a lot smaller than the Sun. But then, I’m not all that hot^*.

I am your density

OK, almost there! All we need to do now is divide those numbers by the respective volumes and compare them. The Sun’s volume is 1.4 x 10³³ cubic centimeters. That means that each cubic centimeter gives off 4 x 10³³ ergs/second / 1.4 x 10³³ cc = 2.8 ergs/second/cc. So every second, each cc of the Sun emits 2.8 ergs. OK then. What about me?

How I know humans and water have the same density.

My volume is easy to estimate: I know humans are the same density as water, which is 1 gram/cc. I also know my mass is about 75,000 grams, so my volume must be 75,000 cc! Easy peasy.

Finally, dividing my luminosity by my volume yields 170,000 ergs/sec/cc.

Hey, wait a sec! That means not only am I brighter than the Sun, I’m a lot brighter! About 60,000 times brighter!

Make a gas of U and ME

So in that sense, the legend is right. If you want to think of it this way, a cubic centimeter of human gives off a lot more energy than the same volume of the Sun does!

But hold on there. Is this really a fair statement?

Well, not really. First, there are a whole lot more cubic centimeters in the Sun (about 10²⁸ times as many, or ten billion billion billion times as many), so when you divide by such a big number the energy per cc for the Sun drops drastically. So even if we say, sure, humans are more luminous per cubic centimeter, it’s best not to get cocky. The Sun can still vaporize us with lots of cubic centimeters left to spare.

Second, remember the assumption I made, that the Sun has the same temperature everywhere? That’s not even close to being true. In fact, it’s whoppingly untrue. The core of the Sun is 15 million Kelvins hot, so each cc there is blasting out vast amounts of energy: about 5 quadrillion times what a cc of human flesh does. But outside of that region the Sun is much cooler, and each cc doesn’t contribute nearly as much. Over the entire Sun, that dilutes the amount of energy per cc quite a bit. Averaging over the volume of the entire Sun is not a great way to think about it, and makes comparisons difficult, if not really meaningless.

Like this exercise has any profound, deeper truths to it in the first place. Actually, it’s just an excuse to have some fun and do some mental gymnastics. And, in the end, it really comes down to this: the Sun is bright, and we are not.

But, you knew that. Of course, some humans are hotter than others. But I’m not sure I can do the math for that.

Tip o’ the pound of flesh to BABloggee Brad Stacey.

Swimmer image from dionhinchcliffe’s Flickr photostream.

While in Copenhagen, I spoke with the folks from Fora.tv for a ten minute interview covering a wide range of topics. These included the dysfunctional way in which our culture processes information about science in general, and about climate science in particular; the continuing stream of misinformation about global warming (particularly the bogus claims that we haven’t had any warming in a decade); the increasing allure of the geoengineering option as progress on emission cuts continues to stall; the reasons for heeding climate models, despite their flaws; and the dangerous possibility that the warming we ultimately see could be on the high end of the current projections.

You can watch it all here, and I have also embedded it below:

The Christmas Day airplane bombing attempt has renewed the debate over full body scanners at airports. The Transportation Security Administration in recent years has tried out a series of “whole-body imagers” to look for threats that typical metal detectors can’t find. These systems are the only way that smuggled explosives, like the one officials say was brought on the Christmas flight, can be reliably found [Wired.com].

Privacy advocates are calling the full body scanners a “digital strip search” (take a look at this TSA image of a full body scan and you’ll get the idea). But some security advocates say that either patting down every passenger or taking full body scans are the only options to ensure certain dangerous items are kept off airplanes.

Right now there are 40 full body scanners in 19 different U.S. airports. Only 6 airports use them for primary screening, the rest are used for follow-up searches. These scanners use millimeter-wave sensors that emit radio frequencies. By measuring the differences in the radiated energy, the scanner produces detailed 3-D images that resembles photo negatives. TSA has also ordered 150 similar scanners, at about $170,000 each, that use backscatter X-ray technology, after the completion of a successful pilot project.

TSA says privacy concerns are unwarranted since facial features (and other body parts?) are blurred out before the screening officer, who is in a separate room, sees the images. A senior U.S. air security source acknowledged the ongoing controversy over using the high-resolution body scanners that can show breast enhancements, body piercings and genitals. Full-body scanners currently in use in the U.S. have been set on a “politically correct” lower resolution that prevented screeners from seeing the outlines of genitals, the source said [New York Daily News]. Supposedly, the images will be permanently deleted immediately after screening.

Last June, the House of Representative voted 310 to 118 to oppose the use of full body scanners as a primary means of screening passengers. This doesn’t mean the issue is dead however, as President Obama has ordered a system-wide review on all screening procedures.

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80beats: Researcher Discovers Effective Profiling; Says It’s More Trouble Than It’s Worth

Image: TSA

A blue moon! See it on New Year's Eve!

Unless you are as unlucky as I am (heh, I know Trudy is in the same boat) you will be treated to a blue moon on New Years eve!  Ok the moon won’t really be blue, but it will be full and also the second full moon in one month and that my friends, is a blue moon.  Gosh it’s been a while since the last one, May of 2007 I think.

The last blue moon on New Years was in 1990 and the next one won’t be until 2028 so while you are ringing in the new year, please take a moment and go outside and look up at the moon.  Hey go out early and take the kids.  It will be a long time before you can do it again and your kids will be adults by then!

Now why am I lamenting my  and as it happens Trudy’s bad luck?  Because even though we are not located all that close together we aren’t so far apart we both will escape the New Years storm heading our way.

After three-plus decades of exploring the gas giants, passing the orbit of Pluto, and reaching points beyond, Voyager 2 has found something interesting near the edge of the solar system: surprisingly magnetic fluff. Researchers document their findings in this week’s Nature.

Of course, this fluff isn’t made from the dust bunnies you find under your bed, the ‘Local Fluff’ (a nickname for the Local Interstellar Cloud) is a vast, wispy cloud of hot hydrogen and helium stretching 30 light-years across [Discovery News]. Astronomers already knew this fluff was out there near the boundary area between our solar system and interstellar space. What surprised them is that the fluff is much more magnetized than they’d expected.

Voyager 2 isn’t actually in the fluff yet, but it can measure the area’s magnetism by observing how its magnetic field deforms the shape of the heliosphere, that balloon of space created by the solar wind pushing outward from our sun. The magnetic field is not only stronger than anticipated—3.7 to 5.5 microgauss—it’s also tilted off the galactic plane of the Milky Way by about 30 degrees, NASA investigator Merav Opher says. “The tilted field probably is a result from turbulence in the interstellar medium outside our solar system or results from collisions of clouds in the solar system neighborhood,” Opher says [USA Today].

Magnetism could answer the question of why the “Local Fluff” continues to exist at all. Though it formed from supernova remnants 10 million years ago, exhaust from other supernovae should have destroyed it by now. It would be like expecting a wisp of cigarette smoke to retain its structure in the middle of a tornado; some kind of force would need to be surrounding (or intertwined through) the smoke helping it resist being dispersed. In the case of the wispy Local Fluff, a magnetic field may be helping [Discovery News].

Next stop for Voyager 2: interstellar space, beyond the influence of the solar wind. By NASA’s calculations, the two voyagers have until about 2025 to keep exploring before their instruments operate no longer.

Related Content:
80beats: Voyager 2 Hits the Edge of the Solar System—And Writes Home
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80beats: NASA Spacecraft Will Soon Map the Solar System’s Distant Edge
The Loom: Astrophilia, a tattooed ode to Voyager 2
DISCOVER: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Aliens, including that the Voyager golden record contains a Bulgarian folk song

Image: NASA

Folks in Europe, Africa, and Asia can say goodbye to 2009 by viewing a very slight lunar eclipse on the last day of the year: Thursday, December 31. The event lasts for about an hour starting at 18:52 UTC, with deepest eclipse, such as it is, at 19:22.

Only a small part of the Moon will be in the deepest part of the Earth’s shadow, so this is nowhere near a total eclipse, when the Earth fully blocks sunlight from reaching the Moon. However, if you go out and take a look you’ll see the full Moon looking distinctly flattened on one side, and perhaps the rest of the Moon’s surface will look dusky. I’ve made a little image here to show you about how much the Moon will be covered, and approximately where. Like I said, only a small part will be darkened.

Not everyone will see this; North and South America are basically shut out of this event since it happens on the other side of the planet and the whole thing’s over before the Moon rises. The image of the Earth here shows where the eclipse will be visible: if you can see where you live, then you can see the eclipse. The closer you are to the center of the map, the higher the Moon will be in the sky at midpoint of the eclipse.

The next lunar eclipse visible will be in June 2010, but it’s partial and will only be visible in Australia. After that, there is a full eclipse in December 2010 which will be seen by North and South America — though the farther west you are the better as far as decent viewing times go (it’ll be around midnight for me in the Mountain time zone).

Anyway, if you want to learn about lunar eclipses (like what I mean by partial versus total, and what an umbra and penumbra are) then take a look at the Mr. Eclipse site, which has great info.

I’ll note that this last eclipse of 2009 is also a so-called Blue Moon: the unofficial term for the second full Moon in a single month. There’s no real significance to it — the Moon ain’t blue, folks, despite a bunch of news sites already posting pictures of the Moon Photoshopped to look that color without explanation. But the real thing here is that celestial geometry is putting on a small show for you, and what better way to ring in a new year?

Tip o’ the umbra to AstroPixie for reminding me about this!

In tomorrow’s New York Times, I have an article about the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea, a new database that’s designed to span the vast diversity of our planet’s microbes. Check it out!

Image: Flickr

There is really no good way to end a high speed car chase. Shooting out the tires of a fleeing vehicle or laying down old fashioned spike strips are both terribly dangerous. Ramming the getaway car with a police cruiser until it spins out is obviously risky. Thankfully, the government is hard at work on the problem and they’ve come up with a solution that maybe ready by next year, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The technology is named the Safe Quick Undercarriage Immobilization Device, but you can call it SQUID.

“SQUID was inspired by a sea creature and a superhero,” says [Engineering Science Analysis Corporation] president Martín Martínez. Like its oceanic namesake, SQUID ensnares its prey with sticky tendrils. Like Spiderman’s webbing, these tendrils stretch to absorb the kinetic energy of their fleeing target.

Huge amounts of such counterforce are necessary to stop a heavy, swift vehicle: Think Spiderman II, where Spidey stretched his webbing for blocks to halt a runaway passenger train. The force nearly killed him. Martínez took a different approach that would have made Spidey proud: Don’t fight the Force; just stop the axles from turning. Do that and you can stop (almost) anything with wheels.

The technology is capable of stopping heavy vehicles, and in one demonstration it quickly brought a pickup truck moving at 35 miles per hour to a gentle halt. Check out the video below from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s YouTube channel (?):

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Video: YouTube / ushomelandsecurity

Wind turbines, energy-efficient light bulbs, and hybrid cars and three of the most iconic products in the lineup of green technologies that can help us build a cleaner world. But in an ironic twist, these technologies all rely on elements called rare earths, which are primarily extracted from environmentally destructive mines in China.

The environmental damage can be seen in the red-brown scars of barren clay that run down narrow valleys and the dead lands below, where emerald rice fields once grew. Miners scrape off the topsoil and shovel golden-flecked clay into dirt pits, using acids to extract the rare earths. The acids ultimately wash into streams and rivers, destroying rice paddies and fish farms and tainting water supplies [The New York Times].

Despite the name, many of the 17 rare earth elements are not actually that scarce, but two heavy rare earths that are vitally important to many green technologies, dysprosium and terbium, do live up to their name. More than 99 percent of the world’s supply of these two elements is currently mined in China. Companies want to expand production outside China, but most rare-earth deposits, unlike those in southern China, are accompanied by radioactive uranium and thorium that complicate mining [The New York Times].

Putting small amounts of dysprosium in the magnets used in electric motors can make the magnets 90 percent lighter; that’s a boon for both hybrid electric cars and large wind turbines, where heavy turbines are placed at the tops of tall towers. Meanwhile, terbium is used in lighting systems that are dramatically more energy-efficient than traditional incandescent lighting. But as prices of these elements have soared in recent years, and as concerns about China’s mines are increasing, companies are beginning to investigate other ways to build the technologies of the future.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

The newest big thing in solar power is a set of solar panels so small that they could be mistaken for specks of glitter.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have produced “microcells” that are thinner than a human hair, which are made from crystalline silicon and use 100 times less material to generate the same amount of electricity as standard solar cells made from 6-inch square solar wafers [Inhabitat].

What’s more, the tiny solar cells could be attached to flexible materials like plastic or cloth, letting inventors dream of a solar power tie that could recharge your cell phone, or a tent that could run electric lights at night.

Says lead researcher Greg Nielson: “With this technology, one can envision ubiquitous [solar-powered] devices.” … In the lab, these hexagonal microcells have achieved photovoltaic efficiencies of about 15 percent, denoting the percentage of light shone on them that is converted into harvestable electricity. High-end commercial-grade solar cells can reap about 20 percent currently, though Nielson thinks the microcells can more than match this [LiveScience].

Even though the tiny solar panels are made of relatively expensive silicon rather than the cheaper materials being used in emerging thin film solar technologies, researchers say that mass-production of the microcells should keep costs low.

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Image: Murat Okandan/Sandia National Laboratories

Quick! Someone call Ray Comfort!

Yup. It’s Jesus in a banana peel. The article has all the usual nonsense, so I’ll spare you the details. But my favorite part is where the banana owner says, "It definitely wasn’t that way when I bought it from [the store]…. ".

<sarcasm>Yes, because once you buy a banana and bring it home, it stays exactly the same forever.</sarcasm>

Sigh. I’ve had bananas go bad on the way home from the store. Bananas are the least stable fruit ever. I bet ten minutes after that picture was taken it looked more like the pareidolia in the kitchen sink.

I suppose there will never come a day when the mainstream media will have an article with a picture like this with the headline, "Random pattern in object appears to look vaguely face-like; owner makes no claim of divinity". That would certainly be news to me!

Tip o’ the polyphenoloxidase to Mauro Mello, Jr.

A very recent Martian crater. Click for a larger version (~100k). Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Pretty new anyways.  The crater is pretty small being only 18 feet (5.5 meters) across. This little crater was formed between January 2006 and May 2008.

The crater was found because this area has been imaged earlier with the Themis instrument and no spot was present.  Then more recently the CTX camera was being used to  survey the Martian surface, the CTX is used because it has lower resolution and therefore more area can be covered to look for changes.  When the same area was imaged and the photos compared a dark spot was noted.

Since the CTX instrument could only detect the spot but not resolve it because the crater is about the size of a single pixel, the HiRise instrument was used to take a hi resolution image of the spot.  The spot of course turned out to be the crater and the dark area around it.

Click the image for more of the area around the crater.  A larger version of the image can be found at the HiRise site.

A fossil dwarf whale, first discovered in Australia over 70 years ago, had an unusual feeding habit. The whale sucked up mud pies in order to feast on sea bed critters, according to a new study. The fossil whale, thought to be between 25 and 28 million years old, hints that mud sucking might have been a precursor to the filter feeding used by today’s baleen whales [National Geographic News]. Modern filter feeders use what’s called baleen—tiny hair-like structures—to filter their prey from the seawater. The most famous, and the largest, baleen species is the blue whale, and the ancient dwarf whale may be a distant relative, say the researchers.

Oddly, the dwarf whale also had teeth, which the researchers speculate were used to chomp on bulky prey that their tongue and facial muscles slurped off the sea floor. Modern whales with baleen plates eat tiny prey such as krill and are distinct from toothed whales, which include beaked whales and orcas (aka killer whales). The ancient whale, Mammalodon colliveri, had a total body length of about 3m. But it appears to have been a bizarre evolutionary “splinter group” from the evolutionary lineage which later led to the 30m-long blue whale [BBC News]. Researchers say the dwarf whale most likely evolved from much larger ancestors and adds evidence to the theory that proto-baleen whales diversified into many experimental body forms, say the researchers, who published their work in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

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Image: Carl Buell

I received an unusual email from, of all people, the Nobel Prize website editor! He was notifying me that the Nobel Prize folks have started a new series of videos where people get a chance to ask questions of Nobel laureates, who will then answer them on YouTube. Pretty cool, and something I heartily approve of. I love it when people get more contact with scientists, especially ones who are doing research that qualifies them for the Nobel!

They started the series off with astronomer John Mather, the Principal Investigator for the James Webb Space Telescope, who won the prize for his work with COBE, the Cosmic Background Explorer. I worked on that project very briefly, and over the next few years had the pleasure of working with John, who is just about as nice as he can be.

Here’s an example of one of the questions — what happened before the Big Bang — with John’s answer:

There are quite a few more, too. If you have an account on YouTube, you can subscribe to the Nobel channel and find out when they will do the next laureate Q&A, too. Very cool.

What with crooks who post status updates while on the lam and snap self-portraits with stolen iPhones, it seems incompetent criminals find technology irresistible. Our latest tale of blundering criminality involves a Bronx man who is quite adept at stealing electronics, but a bit confused about how they work, according to the New York Post:

Jeremiah Gilliam, 22, was caught after playing a stolen game console online — allowing cops in Pelham, where it was stolen, to trace the IP address to his grandmother’s address, cops said.

There, detectives found dozens of video games, laptops, and GPS devices believed to have been stolen from as many as 200 car break-ins and several home burglaries in Westchester County.

While Jeremiah was online gaming away with a stolen Xbox, the console’s owner, a kid, noticed his system was online while playing on another Xbox. He told his parents, who then called the police.

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Discoblog: Stole a Piece of the Internets? Prepare to Be Arrested.

Image: flickr / benjamin-nagel

Vanessa Woods is not only one of my dearest friends, she’s also an extremely gifted writer. Currently at Duke University, she studies the cognitive development of chimpanzees and bonobos at sanctuaries in the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Next June, Vanessa’s latest book, Bonobo Handshake, will be published–and I can’t wait…

Check out this video and read the description below:

Bonobo Handshake

In 2005, Vanessa Woods accepted a marriage proposal from a man she barely knew and agreed to join him on a research trip to the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Settling in at a bonobo sanctuary in Congo’s capital, Vanessa and her fiancé entered the world of a rare ape with whom we share 98.7% of our DNA. Vanessa soon discovered that bonobos live in a peaceful society in which females are in charge, war is nonexistent, and sex is as common and friendly as a handshake.

A fascinating memoir of hope and adventure, Bonobo Handshake traces Vanessa’s self-discovery as she finds herself falling deeply in love with her husband, the apes, and her new surroundings. Courageous and extraordinary, Almost French meets The Poisonwood Bible in this true story of revelation and transformation in a fragile corner of Africa.

Chalk up another unexpected consequence of pumping too much carbon dioxide into the air: According to a new study, the excess CO2 that ends up in seawater is gradually making the oceans noisier.

The changing chemistry of the ocean is one of the major impacts of CO2 emissions. The dissolved gas is changing the pH of the water by making it more acidic, which makes life harder for corals and marine critters with calcium carbonate shells that are corroded by the acidic water. But the new study, published in Nature Geoscience, found that changing the pH of the oceans also reduces the levels of chemicals that absorb sound, like magnesium sulphate and boric acid.

Low-frequency sound in the ocean is produced by natural phenomena such as rain, waves and marine life, and by human activities such as sonar systems, shipping and construction. The sound is absorbed mainly through the viscosity of the water and the presence of certain dissolved chemicals…. But the concentration of chemicals that absorb sound in the oceans has declined as a result of ocean acidification [AFP]. The study found that sound absorption could fall by some 60 percent in high latitudes and deep waters by 2100.

The pH change is only affecting sounds in the lower frequency range, and it’s not yet clear how that will impact marine mammals like dolphins and whales that use acoustics to find food and mates. Says study coauthor Richard Zeebe: “If the noise level increases, it can distract species,” he said. “If they’re trying to identify certain sounds in the ocean important for them for reproduction, feeding or something, and if the background noise is increasing, it could essentially cover certain sounds they depend on. This is a possibility” [Honolulu Star-Bulletin].

Related Content:
80beats: Prepare for a Lobster-Full Future: Acidic Oceans Could Help Some Critters
80beats: Ocean Acidification: Worse Than the Big Problem We Thought It Was
80beats: Oil and Gas Exploration Forces Whales to Speak Up
80beats: Sonar Damage to Dolphins’ Hearing Is Akin to the “Rock-Concert Effect”
80beats: Cacophony in the Oceans May Confuse Whales and Drown Out Their Songs

Image: flickr / jurvetson