OK, this is not really "this week" in science. I just happened to stumble across it while looking for something else, and found it interesting.

Hmmmm...I see a twisted pair of pipe cleaners pulling a nerf ball across a corn cob.

 

Hi Dave

Would you want to be a post brexit PhD student!

This is hilarious!

thinskin

 

Sharp vision: New glasses help the legally blind see

2/26/17


In this photo taken Thursday, Feb. 2, 2017, Yvonne Felix wears eSight electronic glasses and looks around Union Square during a visit to San Francisco. The glasses enable the legally blind to see. Felix was diagnosed with Stargardt's disease after being hit by a car at the age of seven. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)



In this photo taken Thursday, Feb. 2, 2017, Yvonne Felix wears eSight electronic glasses and looks around the lobby of the Hotel Zeppelin during a visit to San Francisco. The glasses enable the legally blind to see. Felix was diagnosed with Stargardt's disease after being hit by a car at the age of seven. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)


In this photo taken Thursday, Feb. 2, 2017, eSight CEO and President Brian Mech holds up a pair electronic glasses at Union Square San Francisco. The glasses enable the legally blind to see. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)


In this photo taken Thursday, Feb. 2, 2017, Yvonne Felix, of Canada, wears eSight electronic glasses and walks through Union Square during a visit to San Francisco. The glasses enable the legally blind to see. Felix was diagnosed with Stargardt's disease after being hit by a car at the age of seven. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)


Jeff Regan was born with underdeveloped optic nerves and had spent most of his life in a blur. Then four years ago, he donned an unwieldy headset made by a Toronto company called eSight.

Suddenly, Regan could read a newspaper while eating breakfast and make out the faces of his co-workers from across the room. He's been able to attend plays and watch what's happening on stage, without having to guess why people around him were laughing.

"These glasses have made my life so much better," said Regan, 48, a Canadian engineer who lives in London, Ontario.

The headsets from eSight transmit images from a forward-facing camera to small internal screens — one for each eye — in a way that beams the video into the wearer's peripheral vision. That turns out to be all that some people with limited vision, even legal blindness, need to see things they never could before. That's because many visual impairments degrade central vision while leaving peripheral vision largely intact.

Although eSight's glasses won't help people with total blindness, they could still be a huge deal for the millions of peoples whose vision is so impaired that it can't be corrected with ordinary lenses.

EYE TEST

But eSight still needs to clear a few minor hurdles.

Among them: proving the glasses are safe and effective for the legally blind. While eSight's headsets don't require the approval of health regulators — they fall into the same low-risk category as dental floss — there's not yet firm evidence of their benefits. The company is funding clinical trials to provide that proof.

The headsets also carry an eye-popping price tag. The latest version of the glasses, released in mid-February, sells for about $10,000. While that's $5,000 less than its predecessor, it's still a lot for people who often have trouble getting high-paying jobs because they can't see.

Insurers won't cover the cost; they consider the glasses an "assistive" technology similar to hearing aids.

ESight CEO Brian Mech said the latest improvements might help insurers overcome their short-sighted view of his product. Mech argues that it would be more cost-effective for insurers to pay for the headsets, even in part, than to cover more expensive surgical procedures that may restore some sight to the visually impaired.

NEW GLASSES

The latest version of ESight's technology, built with investments of $32 million over the past decade, is a gadget that vaguely resembles the visor worn by the blind "Star Trek" character Geordi La Forge , played by LeVar Burton.

The third-generation model lets wearers magnify the video feed up to 24 times, compared to just 14 times in earlier models. There's a hand control for adjusting brightness and contrast. The new glasses also come with a more powerful high-definition camera.

ESight believes that about 200 million people worldwide with visual acuity of 20/70 to 20/1200 could be potential candidates for its glasses. That number includes people with a variety of disabling eye conditions such as macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, ocular albinism, Stargardt's disease, or, like Regan, optic nerve hypoplasia.

So far, though, the company has sold only about 1,000 headsets, despite the testimonials of wearers who've become true believers.

Take, for instance, Yvonne Felix, an artist who now works as an advocate for eSight after seeing the previously indistinguishable faces of her husband and two sons for the first time via its glasses. Others, ranging from kids to senior citizens, have worn the gadgets to golf, watch football or just perform daily tasks such as reading nutrition labels.

EYING THE COMPETITION

ESight isn't the only company focused on helping the legally blind. Other companies working on high-tech glasses and related tools include Aira , Orcam , ThirdEye , NuEyes and Microsoft .

But most of them are doing something very different. While their approaches also involve cameras attached to glasses, they don't magnify live video. Instead, they take still images, analyze them with image recognition software and then generate an automated voice that describes what the wearer is looking at — anything from a child to words written on a page.

Samuel Markowitz, a University of Toronto professor of ophthalmology, says that eSight's glasses are the most versatile option for the legally blind currently available, as they can improve vision at near and far distances, plus everything in between.

Markowitz is one of the researchers from five universities and the Center for Retina and Macular Disease that recently completed a clinical trial of eSight's second-generation glasses. Although the results won't be released until later this year, Markowitz said the trials found little risk to the glasses. The biggest hazard, he said, is the possibility of tripping and falling while walking with the glasses covering the eyes.

The device "is meant to be used while in a stationary situation, either sitting or standing, for looking around at the environment," Markowitz said.

 

"The science is settled!" (And tasty, too!)


Moms say spicy tacos bring labor

5/13/17

The oysters at Loco Taqueria & Oyster Bar may be an aphrodisiac, but the tacos are fast gaining a reputation of their own — the go-to meal for Southie moms-to-be looking to induce labor.

“My husband went in and picked up Loco’s tacos for takeout — General Tso’s, those are my favorite, they have spicy red jalapenos on them — and before we even finished dinner we were packing our bags to go to the Brigham,” laughed Rebecca Greeley, whose son George was born last year.

Greeley was just the start of at least seven pregnant women who have chowed down on spicy food from the South Boston restaurant and bar and given birth just hours later.

And there’s no sign of a slowdown: Southie mom Brittany McGinnis just gave birth to her son Chase on May 1 after eating the Baja fish tacos the previous night on the advice of the restaurant’s bartender, who told her Loco’s grub was a surefire solution for an expectant mom already three days past her due date.

“A couple hours after leaving the restaurant, I started having contractions,” McGinnis said. “Now it’s not coincidence, it’s fact.”

Co-owner Mike Shaw said word of mouth is spreading the legend of his labor-inducing Mexican food.

“It’s bonkers,” Shaw said. “Word got out and now women are coming here to eat to help go into labor. One of our jokes is that now we’re going to have a dining room full of women who are nine months pregnant.”

Erica Gregorio gave birth after hitting up Loco for a Taco Tuesday in November. Shaw came to her table and said they made sure the tacos were extra spicy to bring her labor along. But she didn’t know she was helping to start a trend.

“I didn’t realize it was a phenomenon,” Gregorio told the Herald.

Shaw had been hearing reports of post-Loco births, but a chance meeting with Erin Holland drove the point home. Holland had eaten at Loco in October in hopes of kickstarting her delivery and gave birth to her son Connor the next day.

She joked with Shaw when she met him on the street last month.

“I said, ‘What are you putting in the food? My son was born the day after I ate there, ha ha,’” Holland recalled. “And he said, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me! You’re the sixth woman to say this to me!’”

But while the new moms say the results speak for themselves, it’s unclear which magic ingredient is at work — various mothers have eaten different foods.

Chef Matt Drummond says the secret is his secret chip spice.

“It’s our chip seasoning that causes this. I don’t tell anyone the secret recipe but it’s what everyone snacks on here,” Drummond said. “The seasoning is made of seven spices and is definitely the culprit!”

South Boston resident Rebecca Aiello stuck with the General Tso’s taco when she went to the restaurant with her equally pregnant sister Alexandra Smith in March. Aiello is friends with Greeley and was following her advice.

Not only did Aiello give birth the next day, her sister did as well.

“We had joked about going in. … We decided to come in and within a couple of hours each of us were going into labor,” Aiello said. “It’s definitely crazy. What are the odds?”

--------------------------------

Opening soon: The Loco Labor & Delivery Room. "One stop dropping." (Not to be confused with Loco Home Delivery Service.)

 

Long time ago farmers used to feed hot peppers to their hogs to make them come into heat when they wanted them to. They seemed to think it worked.
Peppers are also feed to birds for several different things.
Mexicans told me to make my pepper plants produce more pepper just take a piss on them every once in a while.

 

A coyote will eat anything. Tin cans, barbed wire, etc. A coyote will not eat a dead mexican...
They're apparently too spicy. Working seismic in South Texas, I came across dead mexicans,
and not a single bite mark on any of them.

 

Not necessarily "this week" in Science, but I saw this on Twitter and thought it interesting.


Venus does rotate respect to the Sun. Its orbit is almost circular, with a mean radius of 0.7 A.U. and an orbital period of 225 days. Venus rotation is retrograde (in the opposite sense of all other planets except Uranus) and very slow: a day on Venus corresponds to 243 Earth days.

 

Talking about digging up bones...

 

Fuckin' A!(nts)


'Paramedic' Ants Are the First to Rescue and Heal Their Wounded Comrades


2/13/18

Matabele ants nurse each other back to health after battle with a surprisingly high success rate, a new study finds.

Matabele ants, native to sub-Saharan Africa, lay siege to the termite colonies they eat by the hundreds, braving the potentially life-threatening bites of large soldier termites that defend them. But what really piqued myrmecologist Erik T. Frank’s interest about these ants was that they carry their wounded home after a raid—a discovery Frank made in 2017.

It turns out their battlefield rescues are just part of the story. Back in the nest, ants take turns caring for their injured comrades, gently holding the hurt limb in place with their mandibles and front legs while intensely “licking” the wound for up to four minutes at a time.

This discovery marks the first time non-human animals have been observed systematically nursing their wounded back to health. Frank and his colleagues describe this behavior in a paper published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Link to video: A new study reveals that after a raid on a termite nest, the injured ants are cared for by their comrades.

“I did not think the ants would have such a sophisticated treatment of the injured—or that it was actually necessary,” Frank told National Geographic.


The ant on the left treats its injured comrade by holding its hurt limb with its mandibles and front limbs and “licking” the wound.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIK FRANK, JULIUS MAXIMILIANS UNIVERSITAT WURZBURG

Frank, who at the time of the research was a Ph.D. student at the University of Würzburg in Germany, wondered what happened to the injured ants once their comrades helped them below ground. Frank and colleagues at the Comoé National Park Research Station in northeastern Côte d'Ivoire created artificial nests topped with a clear cover so an infrared camera could capture the action inside.

They saw that once in the nest, the ants carefully examine injured comrades, probing them with their antennae more than twice as often as healthy nest-mates.

This behavior proved vital: 80 percent of experimentally injured ants died within 24 hours if kept by themselves. But if cared for by their nest-mates for even an hour, only a tenth died. Interestingly, 80 percent survived without treatment if placed in a sterile environment, so Frank believes infections are the main cause of death and this “licking” behavior may help prevent them.

While animals have frequently been observed treating their own wounds, there were only a few anecdotes of animals treating one another prior to this discovery, including an instance of a captive capuchin monkey tending to her infant’s head wound.

BATTLEFIELD TRIAGE
In his earlier work, Frank discovered that injured ants release a pheromone that acts like a signal flare, alerting the raiders that there’s a man down. But this time, he noticed another strategy: playing up their injuries. When no help was in sight, injured ants made a beeline for the nest. But when nest-mates were near, they stumbled and fell, appearing “more injured” as a way to attract aid.

Ants only did this if their injuries were not life-threatening. Mortally wounded ants—ones where Frank removed five legs instead of two—were mostly left to die by raiding parties in field and lab experiments. Such triage makes sense, as it ensures ants don’t waste their resources caring for lost causes; the injured that recover continue to raid, despite their lost limbs. Frank found they comprised more than a fifth of the raiding party even though they’re only five percent of the total colony.


The ant in the middle has termite soldiers clinging to its head and hind leg during a raid.


Researchers observed ants’ raid on termites in the lab by placing the termites in a mound of grass.


This fresh wound on this ant’s would likely be cared for by a healthy ant back in the nest.


The end of a different ant’s injured limb has formed a whitish crust sealing off its wound.

Even when Frank doused the injured ants with the rescue pheromone, their comrades still left them behind. Careful video analysis revealed why: It wasn’t that the healthy ants refused to rescue the gravely injured ants. The dying ants refused to cooperate, flailing their legs around when probed or picked up, forcing their helpers to abandon them. This surprised him.

“In humans in cases were a triage system is necessary, the decision [about] who will receive help is made by the doctor: a top-down regulated system,” Frank noted. “In the ants it's exactly the opposite.”

Helen McCreery, a postdoctoral fellow at Michigan State University who studies social behaviors in ants, found the paper exciting, even though the behavior makes evolutionary sense. “What's the point in rescuing your nest-mate if they won't survive anyway?” she asked. “Still, when I read that they bring wounded ants home, I didn't imagine they would treat the wounds.”

There’s a lot left to learn about why, when, and how social insects may try to rescue one another, she said. “It's quite likely that there are other ant species, or other social insects, that tend to their wounded.”

And that’s something Frank, now a postdoctoral fellow at University of Lausanne in Switzerland, is looking into. If other ants perform similar rescuing behaviors, he wants to know. He also plans to study these ants further to see whether the nursing behavior prevents infections or actually treats them, as the ants could be a novel source of antibiotics.

Christie Wilcox, Ph.D., is a science writer and author obsessed with nature’s underdogs and villains. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and her website.

 

Shooter saw an article that said that experts have done extensive analysis and have determined that aliens would most likely look like an Octopus;


Silly earthlings. While there are nearly as many alien races as stars, and nearly as many types of aliens, the common factor in what they look like is this;


That is until they get aggravated. Then ............


The moral of the story is,
do not irritate the pussy

 

Yeppers. This is science.

 

With all the high tech camera's we have, UFO photo's are always blurry.....
I wanna know why?!?

 

When you can't finish what's on your plate, the saying goes, "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach". What do you say when the gobbler did finish the meal, and it weighed more than the eater (and it was a lot taller)?

Since we're on a porn forum, I'll go with "Now THAT is some deep throat!"


BURMESE PYTHON SNAKE DEVOURS ENTIRE DEER IN FLORIDA


3/2/18

A Burmese python has been documented eating a deer that weighed more than the snake does at Florida's Collier-Seminole State Park, a research organization revealed.

The Conservancy of Southwest Florida took pictures of the 31.5-pound snake regurgitating the 35-pound fawn in what is believed to be the first time such a predator/prey ratio has been caught on film for the Burmese python, Mediumreported.

“This observation is another important piece of evidence for the negative impact invasive Burmese pythons are having on native wildlife across the Greater Everglades Ecosystem,” said Ian Bartoszek, a biologist at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida.

“Imagine the potential consequences to the state and federally protected Florida panther if Burmese pythons adversely affect the number of white-tailed deer, a panther’s primary prey,” he added.

Having followed the snake, the team captured it regurgitating the body of a white-tailed deer that it had earlier ingested, with pictures showing the snake had already digested the deer's head but had not yet digested the body.

The deer was 110 percent of the snake’s body mass, demonstrating the impact the reptile was having on the food chain in the local area.


The python ate the deer, which weighed more than the snake.THE CONSERVANCY OF SOUTHWEST FLORIDA

Explaining the footage, the organization said one of its missions was to protect the wildlife in the local area, with a “new apex predator making its way through the bottom of the food chain.”

The research examined just how far up the food chain the Burmese python had moved, with CBS reporting studies that show the snake may be responsible for a 90 percent decline in small mammal populations in the area.

Indeed, Bartoszek explained that the pythons, which are not native to the area, are a product of the pet trade and had been wreaking havoc on the local wildlife population.

Pythons can grow far larger than the one caught on camera and have been known to eat a variety of wildlife, including rabbits, vermin and now deer.

 

Not really "this week" in Science. More like, "almost 50 years ago" in Science.


Lava-dome Fountain in Hawaii Is One Geologists Will Never Forget
The USGS shared this incredible image on Twitter as a throwback to an amazing sight in 1969. Here’s what you’re seeing.



Fiery Hawaii Lava Bubble Photo Goes Viral 49 Years Later


4/4/18

A spectacular image of a lava bubble in Hawaii quickly gained hundreds of retweets last week, even though the phenomenon occurred nearly a half-century ago.

The photo was shared on Twitter by the U.S. Geological Survey as part of the popular "Throwback Thursday" social media hashtag. In the image, taken Oct. 11, 1969, the 65-foot-tall Hawaiian lava dome resembles a fiery star colliding with Earth.

The lava that formed this dome originated at the Kilauea Volcano, one of the most active volcanoes on Earth, according to the Hawaii Center for Volcanology. It has been in an almost constant state of eruption since 1983.

"Symmetrical dome fountains such as this are rare," said the USGS in the tweet.

Hundreds of the USGS's 700,000 followers shared the tweet, and others left comments expressing awe.

"I'm going to ask Santa for one," said one person.

"This is so cool ... couldn't imagine seeing one!" said another respondent. Then, there was the person who simply said, "Woah."

These lava domes form when thick magma bubbles to the surface and piles up around the vent, according to research from Oregon State University. There isn't enough pressure to cause a violent eruption, so it piles up instead.

Lava domes can grow as tall as 1,600 feet tall, but usually swell to about 30 to 320 feet, the USGS said.

 

Holy AtCow, Batman!


Holy Cow! Mysterious Blast Studied with NASA Telescopes


1/10/19

A brief and unusual flash spotted in the night sky on June 16, 2018, puzzled astronomers and astrophysicists across the globe. The event - called AT2018cow and nicknamed "the Cow" after the coincidental final letters in its official name - is unlike any celestial outburst ever seen before, prompting multiple theories about its source.

Over three days, the Cow produced a sudden explosion of light at least 10 times brighter than a typical supernova, and then it faded over the next few months. This unusual event occurred inside or near a star-forming galaxy known as CGCG 137-068, located about 200 million light-years away in the constellation Hercules. The Cow was first observed by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert Systemtelescope in Hawaii.

So exactly what is the Cow? Using data from multiple NASA missions, including the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), two groups are publishing papers that provide possible explanations for the Cow's origins. One paper argues that the Cow is a monster black hole shredding a passing star. The second paper hypothesizes that it is a supernova - a stellar explosion - that gave birth to a black hole or a neutron star.

Researchers from both teams shared their interpretations at a panel discussion on Thursday, Jan. 10, at the 233rd American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.


Watch what scientists think happens when a black hole tears apart a hot, dense white dwarf star. A team working with observations from NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory suggests this process explains a mysterious outburst known as AT2018cow, or "the Cow." Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center


A Black Hole Shredding a Compact Star?


One potential explanation of the Cow is that a star has been ripped apart in what astronomers call a "tidal disruption event." Just as the Moon's gravity causes Earth's oceans to bulge, creating tides, a black hole has a similar but more powerful effect on an approaching star, ultimately breaking it apart into a stream of gas. The tail of the gas stream is flung out of the system, but the leading edge swings back around the black hole, collides with itself and creates an elliptical cloud of material. According to one research team using data spanning from infrared radiation to gamma rays from Swift and other observatories, this transformation best explains the Cow's behavior.

"We've never seen anything exactly like the Cow, which is very exciting," said Amy Lien, an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "We think a tidal disruption created the quick, really unusual burst of light at the beginning of the event and best explains Swift's multiwavelength observations as it faded over the next few months."

Lien and her colleagues think the shredded star was a white dwarf - a hot, roughly Earth-sized stellar remnant marking the final state of stars like our Sun. They also calculated that the black hole's mass ranges from 100,000 to 1 million times the Sun's, almost as large as the central black hole of its host galaxy. It's unusual to see black holes of this scale outside the center of a galaxy, but it's possible the Cow occurred in a nearby satellite galaxy or a globular star cluster whose older stellar populations could have a higher proportion of white dwarfs than average galaxies.

A paper describing the findings, co-authored by Lien, will appear in a future edition of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"The Cow produced a large cloud of debris in a very short time," said lead author Paul Kuin, an astrophysicist at University College London (UCL). "Shredding a bigger star to produce a cloud like this would take a bigger black hole, result in a slower brightness increase and take longer for the debris to be consumed."

Or a New View of a Supernova?

A different team of scientists was able to gather data on the Cow over an even broader range of wavelengths, spanning from radio waves to gamma rays. Based on those observations, the team suggests that a supernova could be the source of the Cow. When a massive star dies, it explodes as a supernova and leaves behind either a black hole or an incredibly dense object called a neutron star. The Cow could represent the birth of one of these stellar remnants.

"We saw features in the Cow that we have never seen before in a transient, or rapidly changing, object," said Raffaella Margutti, an astrophysicist at Northwestern Universityin Evanston, Illinois, and lead author of a study about the Cow to be published in The Astrophysical Journal. "Our team used high-energy X-ray data to show that the Cow has characteristics similar to a compact body like a black hole or neutron star consuming material. But based on what we saw in other wavelengths, we think this was a special case and that we may have observed - for the first time - the creation of a compact body in real time."

Margutti's team analyzed data from multiple observatories, including NASA's NuSTAR, ESA's (the European Space Agency's) XMM-Newton and INTEGRAL satellites, and the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array. The team proposes that the bright optical and ultraviolet flash from the Cow signaled a supernova and that the X-ray emissions that followed shortly after the outburst arose from gas radiating energy as it fell onto a compact object.

Typically, a supernova's expanding debris cloud blocks any light from the compact object at the center of the blast. Because of the X-ray emissions, Margutti and her colleagues suggest the original star in this scenario may have been relatively low in mass, producing a comparatively thinner debris cloud through which X-rays from the central source could escape.

"If we're seeing the birth of a compact object in real time, this could be the start of a new chapter in our understanding of stellar evolution," said Brian Grefenstette, a NuSTAR instrument scientist at Caltech and a co-author of Margutti's paper. "We looked at this object with many different observatories, and of course the more windows you open onto an object, the more you can learn about it. But, as we're seeing with the Cow, that doesn't necessarily mean the solution will be simple."

NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. NuSTAR was developed in partnership with the Danish Technical University and the Italian Space Agency (ASI). The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, Virginia. NuSTAR's mission operations center is at UC Berkeley, and the official data archive is at NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center. ASI provides the mission's ground station and a mirror archive. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center manages the Swift mission in collaboration with Penn State in University Park, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems in Dulles, Virginia. Other partners include the University of Leicester and Mullard Space Science Laboratory of the University College London in the United Kingdom, Brera Observatory and ASI.

 

An earthquake lasted 50 days, but no one felt it. Here's why.


“You could call them phantom quakes,” one geologist says of the tectonic phenomena known as slow slip events.

2/12/19

Back in the summer of 2016, a big earthquake struck northwestern Turkey. That’s not so unusual, considering that the region sits atop a highly active branching fault network that has a history of producing some seriously powerful tremblors.

The strange thing about this particular quake is that it lasted for 50 days, and not a single soul felt it.

According to a new study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, the temblor was a very peculiar type of earthquake known as a slow slip event. Unlike “typical” earthquakes, which crack the crust with a sudden jolt, slow slips involve very gradual movement along a fault. They release none of the damaging seismic waves you might normally expect, which means they don’t produce shaking.

"You could call them phantom quakes,” says study leader Patricia Martínez-Garzón, a geomechanics researcher at GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam. So what exactly are slow slip events, and what do they mean for overall earthquake hazards? We’ve got you covered.

A spectrum of slippery faults
Slow slip events were discovered in the Cascadia Subduction Zone in the U.S. Pacific Northwest in the early 2000s, shortly before they were spotted in New Zealand’s subduction zones, says Rebecca Bell, a senior lecturer studying tectonic evolution at Imperial College London.

Prior to the turn of the millennium, the consensus among geologists was that faults could break in two main ways. On one end of the scale, you get stick-slip faults, which can get stuck for hundreds of thousands of years before suddenly rupturing in large quakes. On the other end, you get faults that creep along quite passively, moving no faster than the rate at which your fingernails grow.

“Slow slip events made us realize that there’s a whole spectrum of fault slip between the two,” Bell says. These curiosities release the energy matching that of a sudden, big earthquake but happen over such a long time that the energy never translates to any surface shaking. If the former could be compared to powder keg explosions, then slow slip events are more like candles slowly burning through their fuel.

Their glacial pace cannot be understated. The Turkish quake’s 50-day odyssey may sound slow, but it’s not so unusual, says Lucile Bruhat, an earthquake physics researcher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.

To her knowledge, the longest slow slip event ever recorded was in Alaska, and it produced a magnitude 7.8 event that took at least nine years to come to an end. This event took so long that until it stopped, the researchers had assumed that the fault’s gradual crawl was simply what the region had always been doing.

Hunting down tectonic ghosts
This slowness means that, unless you’re on the lookout for them, slow slip events are easy to miss. What’s more, the lack of seismic waves means that the events can’t be detected with seismometers. Geologists first noticed slow slip quakes based on data from GPS stations, which record the changing shape of the planet’s surface.

In New Zealand, there are two hotspots for slow slip events. One lies beneath the capital city, Wellington, and involves events equal to a magnitude 7.0 quake. But because they take 12 to 18 months to occur and they happen at considerable depths, the inhabitants of the city are none the wiser.

The other hot spot sits in the northeast corner of the country’s North Island. These shallower slow slip events are of similar magnitude but are far stranger. Here, they repeat almost like clockwork every 18 months to two years, “almost where you can forecast where the next one is about to occur,” Bell says. This gives geoscientists a rare opportunity to install instrumentation at just the right time to spot them.

Under pressure
Detecting slow slip events is just one piece of the puzzle. The very fact they are seen as odd showcases just how early our understanding of these phenomena actually is. Working out what triggers slow slip events is a top priority for phantom quake hunters.

But so far, “the origins and nature of slow earthquakes are somewhat enigmatic,” says Masayuki Kano, an assistant professor of geophysics at Tohoku University.

There is a chance that slow slip events are driven by strange mechanical properties of fault material that we simply don’t yet understand. It’s also possible that slow slip faults are under a higher fluid pressure, meaning that they are better lubricated and can crawl along at a gradual pace. Laboratory experiments mimicking these conditions seem to back up this idea, but it’s still unclear whether that’s the case on a larger scale in the real world.

Increasingly intricate fieldwork may help solve the puzzle. Martínez-Garzón’s team has now covered the part of Turkey around the Sea of Marmara with plenty more strain meters. Bell and her colleagues have been burying seismometers within parts of New Zealand’s Hikurangi subduction zone to reveal the properties of the faults that slowly slip. The International Ocean Discovery Program has also drilled into the subduction zone there to directly sample the sediments involved with these slow slip events, while also sending seismic waves through the region to better map out the fault networks there.

These multidisciplinary efforts are vital to unravelling the secrets of slow slip events, Kano says, which may in turn help us better understand their more destructive cousins.

Dancing in the depths
It already appears that large quakes can initiate slow slip. A normal magnitude 4.4 quake took place in the Sea of Marmara shortly before the slow slip of 2016 began. And after New Zealand’s Kaikoura earthquake in 2016, slow slip was detected all over the region. These type of events hint at an interaction between seismic and aseismic processes, Martínez-Garzón says.

“Can slow slip events trigger big earthquakes, though?” Bell wonders. “That’s the bigger question, and one we haven’t really solved.”

That certainly matters for the Sea of Marmara. This region is home to some truly devastating earthquakes, including the 1999 Izmit quake that killed 17,000 people. Although cautious, Martínez-Garzón suspects that the slow slip events could be putting stress on other, more dangerous faults.

Slow slip events could also be the key to forecasting future devastation. Shortly before the horrific magnitude 9 Tōhoku earthquake in Japan in 2011, slow slip had already started to take place, but it’s difficult to tell if this was down to chance or not, Bell says.

If it’s eventually confirmed that slow slip takes place before large events, then the potential for life-saving earthquake forecasting here is huge.

“For now, though,” Bruhat says, “we have no idea how to distinguish an ultra-rare slow slip event that would trigger a large earthquake from a harmless one.”

 

Robot Waiters In This Tokyo Cafe Are Controlled By Disabled People


1/3/19

A cafe with an all-robot wait staff controlled by paralyzed people has recently concluded its eight-month experiment in Tokyo, Japan.

Ten people with a variety of conditions including spinal cord injuries and the progressive neurodegenerative disease ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) were employed at Dawn Ver café, according to Sankei.

The robot's operators earned about 1,000 yen ($9) per hour - the standard rate of pay for wait staff in Japan.



From home or hospital, they operated the small fleet of OriHime-D robots used in the cafe, which were developed by Japanese start-up Ory and were initially designed to be used in the homes of people with disabilities.

Sankei reported that robots could be told to move, observe, communicate with guest and carry objects to tables, even if their operator can only roll their eyes.

The pilot program started in April of last year and concluded on December 7 at the Nippon Foundation Building in Minato-ku, Tokyo. Researchers collected vital data on the connections between disabled people and robots, to encourage plans of integrating people who might otherwise be housebound earn a wage and interact with other people more easily.

“If the people operating the robots feel the joy of serving customers and working in a café, I think it’s wrong to leave that to AI,” said Kentaro Yoshifuji, the CEO of Ory Lab Inc.



This experiment, done in cooperation with The Nippon Foundation, Avatar Robotic Consultative Association (ARCA), All Nippon Airways (ANA) and Ory seems to have been a limited-time event, but a new crowdfunding operation aims to open a permanent location with disabled people controlling robot servers by 2020.

Maybe disabled people controlling robots in restaurants could be the first push back against AI. As we have warned before, AI robots were built to replace low-skilled workers that could trigger economic disruption far greater than we experienced over the past eight decades. By the end of the 2020s, automation may eliminate 20% to 25% of current jobs, so by allowing disabled people today to operate robots in the service sector, well, it is a start, but it will sadly not be enough to stop the AI takeover.

 

Although this piece is really a piece from the editorial page of The Boston Herald, it is part science, but also part comedy, along with a good sized chunk of "oh dayum!"



The sci-fi future has arrived



The rhesus macaque is one of the best-known species of Old World monkeys. It is listed as Least Concern in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species in view of its wide distribution, presumed large. Photo Getty Images


2019/07/07

For those of you who’ve been following stories of UFO sightings by Navy pilots, and mysterious lights popping up in the skies around the world, relax. A freaky sci-fi doomsday scenario is unlikely to be sparked by extraterrestrial shenanigans.

Not while prehistoric super-fast insects are evolving to be unkillable.

Oh, and they’re everywhere.

We speak of the German cockroaches (Blattella germanica, accent on the bla), the most common species, which are becoming resistant to pesticides and may soon be impossible to kill with chemicals alone.

There was, of course, a study.

Researchers in the Department of Entomology at Purdue University in Indiana recently found that the little buggers are becoming cross-resistant to insecticides, meaning their offspring are born already impervious to the poisons. And this can happen in a single generation.

“We didn’t have a clue that something like that could happen this fast,” said professor Michael Scharf, co-author of the study — though we’re sure we’ve heard that same line in a ’50s horror movie, usually before the giant eight-legged hairy whatsit demolishes a sleepy town.

If anything shakes your view that we’re an apex predator, it’s news that something a fraction of our size is evolving ways to thwart our attempts to kill it. We suggest renaming the species Blattella Come-At-Me-Bro.

While this may be good news for the SyFy channel (“Roachnado,” anyone?), it bodes less well for the rest of us, because these icks are found around the world.

This looks like a job for science, right? Don’t hold your breath — because the guys who got straight A’s in advanced bio are taking scary to a whole new level.

Scientists in China are busy making a new kind of monkey — one with a human brain. A monkey with human-like intelligence — what could possibly go wrong?

In a study published in Beijing’s National Science Review journal in March, researchers introduced the human gene into monkey embryos and voila — a cute little macaque that can worry about his 401(k). There’s already been an ethical uproar over this, and concerns over future development of human-ape chimeras. Ostensibly, this is all to study the process of brain disease and other health-related research.

But really — has no one seen “Planet of the Apes”?

Much has been said about our impact on the planet — little of it good. Between pollution, deforestation, overpopulation and climate change, mankind hasn’t been a great tenant. But monkeying around (pun intended) with a species that already shares so much of our DNA, no matter how lofty the goal, is just throwing a flaming mattress out of the top-story window. The landlord will have something to say.

Back to the roaches — we’re sure some chemical genius is working on the ultimate, this’ll-get-’em pesticide, something plutonium-based with the fresh scent of lavender, no doubt. Which will work until it doesn’t. And then what?

Well, if “Game of Thrones” has taught us anything, it’s that alliances are crucial. And roaches are thigmotropic, meaning they like feeling something solid against their bodies. So if we can convince/bribe them into acting as living body armor in the coming Hybrid Monkey Wars, we might just stand a chance.

Either that, or the next time a UFO is spotted, try to hop a lift.

 

"Newborn" ocean in Ethiopia. Now, these things take a while to form, so check back every 1000 years or so.