Apex Predator

A gray wolf watches biologists in Yellowstone National Park, shortly after they fitted it with a tracking collar. The photo dates to 2003, 9 years after wolves were first re-introduced to the U.S. Northern Rockies.

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

The story goes something like this: Once upon a time, we exterminated the wolves from the Rocky Mountain West, including the part that would become Yellowstone National Park. We thought this was a good idea because wolves frightened us, and also because they ate the domestic livestock we liked a lot more.

But then interest in environmental conservation took hold. Scientists discovered that without wolves present in Yellowstone to hunt and kill prey, the elk population grew so large it ate up all the young willow trees until there were none. This affected the habitat of many other animals and plants in harmful ways and the ecosystem became unbalanced. Or, as science puts it, we caused a harmful “top-down trophic cascade” by removing an apex predator, the wolf, from the food web.

It followed that returning the apex predator might right that balance; and field biologists began to find some evidence for this idea, even as popular support increased for bringing wolves back. So with conservation ethics and ecological science in pretty good alignment, we re-introduced the wolves to Yellowstone, where today they scare away the hungry elk herds from the tasty young willows. Thanks to the wolf, balance has been restored.

Or not? Earlier in the week, field biologist Arthur Middleton got a big reaction from readers when he asked “Is the wolf a real american hero?” in the opinion pages of The New York Times.“This story — that wolves fixed a broken Yellowstone by killing and frightening elk — is one of ecology’s most famous,” he wrote. “But there is a problem with the story: It’s not true.”

Animated discussion ensued in the comments (which The New York Times actively curates for signal over noise), with some readers protesting that the wolves have been crucial to Yellowstone's ecological revival. “Inside Yellowstone—which is where the writer is talking about even though his research was done outside Yellowstone—elk are what wolves eat,” commented well-known conservationist Carl Safina. “As a PhD ecologist myself, it's hard to see how 60% fewer elk could affect vegetation as much as before.”

Journalist Emma Marris, who recently wrote about wolf/ecosystem science for the journal Nature, finds that Middleton's stance aligns with a growing body of evidence.  “It's an evolving understanding that started out with a really beautiful and simple story, and is just getting more complex,” says Marris, author of the book Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. “There's legitimate scientific disagreement here. But I think it can't be denied that the beauty of that story plays a role in how much attention it gets.”

Some of the recent studies suggest that trophic cascades in land-based ecosystems are more “center-out” than top-down, composed of many, many radial lines of cause and effect, continuing to change over time. This shifts our understanding of apex predators as “keystone species” whose presence makes or breaks a healthy ecosystem.

“Every population of wolves has a different, interesting story going on with them,” says Marris. 'In some places there are not enough of them, in some places people are concerned there are too many. And in some it's a question of how they're interacting with the rest of the ecosystem.”

Mixed Messages

When you see a sign like this in Montana, it has many possible meanings.

Emma Marris

At Yellowstone, despite the re-introduction of wolves, the willows are not actually recovering as well as was hoped. One reason, Marris found, may be that wolves don't actually scare elk away from their preferred feeding areas, as earlier research suggested they might. “When elk are really hungry, they're going to take their chances with the wolves,” Marris says.

Another reason for poor willow recovery may be that the wolves came back to Yellowstone too late to affect the fate of another animal population: the beavers. “Elk populations were really high while the wolves were gone,” says Marris. “That was caused by the absence of wolves, but also presumably by human management decisions, climate, and other factors."

Elks and beavers competed for the same food: willow. The elks won, beaver numbers dropped, and so did the extent of marshy habitat. "Without beaver dams creating willow-friendly environments," Marris says, "the willows can't recover."

In reporting her article, Marris learned that beyond the pages of scientific journals, the gaps between researchers who do and don't support the apex predator theory are really fairly narrow.  Generally it's accepted that there is a lot more involved in balancing an ecosystem. “But some still believe carnivores are somewhat special in their top-down effects on the ecosystem,” she says. Wolves generate a lot of emotion as well as attention because they've become a bell-weather for the fate of wilderness. “Everywhere wolves exist,” says Marris, “they tell stories about how people and wild things make peace, or don't make peace, in the 21^st century.”

What's most at risk as we debate the role of wolves in the ecosystem seems to be our hope for a really straightforward story that explains what's going on around us.

Pi(e)

GJ via Wikimedia Commons

Holy cow, you're thinking, this Doug Main character must be a genius, to have come up with a discovery of such staggering magnitude. Well, I'll let you think what you like, but the revelation came to me in the form of a tweet, by reporter Emily Crockett. A slice of key lime for you, Emily.

So go on, celebrate! Eat a slice of pie every day! Every single day, why not? You've only got 18 days left. While you're at it, buy a protractor! Bake me a strawberry rhubarb! Get way into number theory! But whatever you do, just don't make a bill to change the value of pi to 3.2, like Indiana did in 1897. That would render this whole post moot. And it would be wrong. 

I now have also realized that next year on this day it will be 3/14/15, the first five digits of pi. I don't need to tell you how crazy the university math departments around the world are going to get on that day.

For more pi-related fun, head over here to see some amazing visualizations of pi. Or search pi for any string of digits that you desire, like your social security number. 

Bang! Supernova SN 2006gy

Nasa/CXC/M. Weiss

What's the latest cosmology gossip? According to the BBC, the field is awash with rumors that next week, American scientists will announce the detection of gravitational waves: incredibly small ripples carrying energy across the void of the universe.

Space.com reports simply that at a press conference scheduled for 12:00 noon EDT on Monday, March 17, "[A] team of scientists will unveil what they bill as a 'major discovery' in the field of astrophysics...at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics."

Predicted by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity, gravitational waves are speculated to be “an echo of the big bang [sic] in which the universe came into existence 14bn year ago,” writes the Beeb, which caught an echo of the intense excitement that seems to be swirling among scientists with these and other quotes:

"If they do announce primordial gravitational waves on Monday, I will take a huge amount of convincing," said Hiranya Peiris, a cosmologist from University College London. "But if they do have a robust detection … Jesus, wow! I'll be taking next week off."

..."If a detection has been made, it is extraordinarily exciting. This is the real big tick-box that we have been waiting for. It will tell us something incredibly fundamental about what was happening when the universe was 10^-34 seconds old," said Prof Andrew Jaffe, a cosmologist from Imperial College, London, who works on another telescope involved in the search called Polarbear.

This seems to be a fantastic moment in time to be a physicist. In addition to this possible discovery of gravitational waves, theorists are still digesting data gathered in 2012 from the Large Hadron Collider, including proof of the existence of the elusive Higgs particle. That's the story covered in the engrossing new film “Particle Fever,” which you should definitely go see.

Martin Krzywinski

3.14159265358979323846264338327: the first 30 digits of pi. Happy Pi Day! (see how science artist Martin Krzywinski turned the irrational number into colorful circular diagrams here)

1,315 times the diameter of the sun: the size of this yellow hypergiant star, one of the 10 largest stars ever discovered 

Artist's Interpretation of HR 5171

ESO

8: the number of robotics companies recently acquired by Google (read about Google's growing robot army here)

Google's Robotic Army

Illustration by Paul Lachine

14 shots per second: the speed of this fully automatic rubber band gun

Rubber Band Machine Gun

Courtesy Alex Shpetniy

12 percent: the portion of U.S. electricity that comes from recycled heat, compared with Denmark's 50 percent, Finland's 39 percent, and Russia's 31 percent

2015: the year Ukraine hopes to complete a new radar system 

MR-1 Radar System

Ukraine's new RADAR system.

Ukroboronprom State Concern

$15,000: the cost to build this lawnmower tank

Tank Mower

Illustration by Chris Philpot

200 volts: the charge produced when scientists tipped a tupperware container filled with flour back and forth until cracks appeared (read about how this could help solve the mystery of pre-earthquake lights here)

1952: the year computer scientist Alan Turing published a paper proposing a model for how cells change and develop—a theory scientists have recently validated with experimental evidence 

$35,000: the total prizes in a NASA challenge to develop software that detects Earth-threatening asteroids (Computer programmers! Here's how to enter)

Potentially Deadly

This illustration shows an asteroid breaking up as it orbits a white dwarf.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Samurai Gunn

In the age of Call of Duty and Halo and every other massively popular videogame, an idea has formed: if you can't play the game online, with the option to duke it out with or against friends or strangers, it's missing a fundamental piece. If a game is released to consumers without the function, it's suddenly cause for a demerit. Why, after all, wouldn't you have that option? There's no reason not to include it, right? 

Well, no, not quite. In an excellent piece for Polygon, Bennett Foddy, creator of the amazing frustration-generation machine QWOP, lays out the case for creating a game that can only be played with friends sitting around in a living room. The idea is simple, genuine, and makes sense from a creative and technical standpoint.

The bane of every gamer is lag. Occasionally, you'll be playing online, and suddenly the game will skip a few frames ahead. The information you're getting is different from what someone else is getting, and the server is attempting to reconcile those two facts. He explains:

Though modern video game netcode is hideously complex, the problem it seeks to solve is simple enough: Even in the absolute best-case scenario, when we have a dedicated server and everyone on it has a ping in the teens, it still takes a lot of time for your computer to communicate with the server, and for the server to communicate with the other players.

As a result, your computer is always getting information that is a few frames out of date, even if your opponent is on a fast connection and located on a computer nearby. Much of the time, your computer does not agree with your opponent's computer about what's going on in the game. This is known as "lag."

Polygon

As Foddy points out, this is a function of computers failing to work in sync, and no amount of coding finesse can really "fix" the issue: 

Lag is not the kind of problem that can be eliminated by clever programming; it's just a fact about how fast you can send messages to the server. At most, developers can write code that makes the problem less noticeable for the player. So for the past two decades, programmers have toiled to find new ways around this fundamental problem.

There are, however, some workarounds. Clever designers have attempted to get computers and game systems to pre-emptively predict lag and adjust what you see on your screen accordingly, or design a game from the ground-up to make it possible and pleasant for multiplayer action. The issue is, this simply doesn't work for every game--games that require direct, fast-paced interaction between players can be ruined by lag. If designers don't anticipate this from the day they start building the game, it can be in tatters by the time it's released. There's nothing inherently wrong with making a game with that in mind, but it shouldn't required and expected of every game. That stifles creativity, and leads to an expectation that ultimately doesn't help designers or players.

You can read the whole Foddy article here. Might change your mind about what you want from a game. You can also play another of his games, PoleRiders, right here. 

[Polygon]

Creation

Louisiana may soon repeal an act, put in place in 1981, that required public schools to teach creationism alongside evolution. But it's not as if the act has necessarily been in, uh, action since then. A few years after its passage, the Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act underwent several legal challenges. In 1987, it went to the Supreme Court, which ruled it unconstitutional because it "endorses religion by advancing the religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind."

Edwards v. Aguillard was a major trial in the history of creationism in American schools. It received national attention and altered the tactics of those who sought to teach creationism in schools afterward. Now, of course, an entire generation has gone by. New Orleans' The Times-Picayunedescribes the bill to appeal the "Balanced Treatment" Act as "one of many brought this year seeking to strike unconstitutional, and therefore unenforceable, laws from Louisiana's books."

Louisiana's Senate Education Committee approved the bill this week. One senator Mike Walsworth, a Republican for West Monroe, dissented. The rest of the committee overrode Walsworth, and now the bill will go to the full state senate.

Should the bill pass, we can see only one drawback. It will strike from Louisiana's books a really amazingly-worded law. We kind of love how the act talks about "creation-science," "evolution-science," and protecting the rights of any teacher who may choose to be a "creation-scientist." Advocacy aimed at teaching creationism in schools were never quite the same after Edwards v. Aguillard. Activists switched to subtler terms, such as "intelligent design." (Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University, described the switchover as an expert witness for a 2005 creationism-in-schools trial.)

Meanwhile, Louisiana continues to debate how it teaches science to kids. Last year, the state senate spent hours deciding on a bill to repeal the Louisiana Science Education Act. The 2008 act "promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning." (See? It's already not as fun to read as the "Balanced Treatment" Act.) Critics say the Louisiana Science Education Act leaves the door open for creationism in schools. Supporters say that hasn't happened and isn't an important danger of the act. The bill was killed in committee.

Nikolas Becker/Wikimedia Commons

What is The Future of Journalism? Data reporting? Drones? Computer-generated news, like the algorithms are already breaking news on today's California earthquake?

Case for the latter: Compare the first few paragraphs from two news stories about a sports game, re-published in a recent study.

Even with an unexceptional outing for Philip Rivers, the Chargers handled the Chiefs, 37-20, at Arrowhead Stadium.

Rivers found the end zone for two touchdowns against the Chiefs on 18 of 23 passing for 209 yards and one pick. Matt Cassel went 24 of 42 with 251 yards passing, two touchdowns and three picks for the Chiefs.

Jackie Battle carried the ball 15 times for 39 yards with a touchdown in addition to four receptions for 42 yards and another touchdown. Antonio Gates caught three passes for 59 yards.

Versus: 

Matt Cassel, Russell Wilson and Mark Sanchez have struggled, and their starting jobs are in jeopardy.

Their passes might sail high, but three NFL quarterbacks have landed far short of expectations.

Kansas City's Matt Cassel, Seattle's Russell Wilson, and the New York Jets’ Mark Sanchez aren't the only starting quarterbacks who are struggling—there are several—but they're the ones inching ever closer to the bench.

Can you tell which was written by an algorithm? It's the first, while the second comes from a real human being at the Los Angeles Times. If you couldn't make out the difference, don't worry--other people couldn't, either.

Start-up companies like Narrative Science have been using algorithms to produce short, simple news articles for a fair amount of time now. But we don't have too much science on how readers feel about those articles. Researcher Christer Clerwall of Karlstad University in Sweden had a group read both of those articles, and then surveyed them on how they felt: Which seemed more objective? Easier to read?

Here's how the results looked:

Christer Clerwall

You'll notice the ratings are fairly close, and the study notes that, too; the only statistically significant field was "pleasant to read," where the journalist article won handily. (Take that, machines.) But the fact that the results weren't significant is, in itself, possibly significant; the people surveyed didn't seem to care which article they read. This was backed up when Clerwall had the participants guess which article was written by a person, and which by a machine. "Of the 27 respondents who read the software-generated text, 10 thought a journalist wrote it and 17 thought it was software-generated. For the 18 respondents in the 'journalist group,' 8 perceived it as having been written by a journalist, but 10 thought software wrote it," he writes in the study. 

But if you're hoping to invest in journalism-robots, caveat emptor: This was a tiny sample; you'd need a lot more research to prove machines could outperform--or even match--journalists. (Or, well, vice versa.) Although maybe this article wouldn't score high on the "objectivity" portion of that scale.

You can read the full study online here.

Space-time curvature

An artist's conception of the way the mass of Earth warps space-time. Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in this fabric of space-time.

Johnstone via Wikimedia Commons

Scientists announced today (March 17) that they had found the first direct evidence of the dramatic expansion that created the known universe, known as cosmic inflation, or the "bang" in the Big Bang. This dramatic expansion is thought to have occurred in the first instants of existence, nearly 14 billion years ago, causing the universe to expand beyond the reach of the most powerful telescopes. 

In 1979, a physicist named Alan Guth came up with the theory of cosmic inflation, and theorized that such an event would create ripples in space-time called gravitational waves. But their existence remained hypothetical. Today, a team of researchers said that they had detected these gravitational waves, using a telescope near the South Pole. 

"This is huge," Marc Kamionkowski, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the discovery but who predicted how these gravitational wave imprints could be found, told Scientific American. “It’s not every day that you wake up and find out something completely new about the early universe." He added that the results looked good, although they would need to be verified by others to hold up. 

The finding seems to support the idea that the observable universe is only one of many, as the New York Times reports: 

Confirming inflation would mean that the universe we see... is only an infinitesimal patch in a larger cosmos whose extent, architecture and fate are unknowable. Moreover, beyond our own universe there might be an endless number of other universes bubbling into frothy eternity, like a pot of pasta water boiling over.

As the Times tells it, Andrei Linde, who first described the most popular variant of inflation, known as chaotic inflation, in 1983, was about to go on vacation in the Caribbean last week when a colleague named Chao-Lin Kuo knocked on his door with a bottle of Champagne to tell him the news. 

Hear Linde and Kuo tell the story themselves in this video: 

A Mouse Fetus Made From The New STAP Stem Cells

Haruko Obokata

An investigation of two troubled stem-cell papers has found no evidence, so far, of "research misconduct," the investigating institute said in an announcement. The institute, RIKEN of Tokyo, looked at two accusations against the papers and is still waiting to rule on four more. RIKEN employs many of the scientists involved in the papers, which made news in January because they described fast and easy way to turn adult skin cells into embryonic-like stem cells. But the papers quickly drew criticism as other scientists found their results impossible to reproduce.

RIKEN launched its investigation in response to the criticism. Its latest announcement, made Friday, is especially helpful because it lays out which criticisms RIKEN is considering. Among the "items still under investigation" are charges that a section of one of the papers was copied from another paper, and that some photos in the papers, purporting to show new experiments, were actually copied from research conducted by one of the scientists as a graduate student.

RIKEN defines "research misconduct" as plagiarizing other papers, making up data, or manipulating data unfairly.

Among the two items RIKEN has decided upon, it found that one was an honest mistake, in which someone forgot to delete a photo before including it in the published paper. "This was not judged as a case of research misconduct," the RIKEN announcement explained, because "there was no malice intended."

What happens now? Well, RIKEN's investigation will continue. The institute will also publish an English-language version of its report "at a later date," it says.

As for the papers themselves, the scientists who wrote it have the option of retracting it, which means formally withdrawing it from publication. A retraction is a sign that there's a major problem with a paper. Among other reasons, scientists may retract—or be forced to retract—their papers when they've been found to have made up data or plagiarized writing. Scientists may also retract papers about research they conducted honestly, but later research found incorrect. (This doesn't always happen, but it's nice when it does.)

The stem-cell folks don't seem to agree whether to retract their papers. One author, Teruhiko Wakayama of the University of Yamanashi, previously told reporters he wanted to retract the papers. The senior scientist on the papers, Charles Vacanti of Harvard University in the U.S., "has made clear that he does not plan to retract," Nature News reported.

It's not as clear what the remaining authors from RIKEN think. Nature News reported that the director of the RIKEN Center for Development Biology, Masatoshi Takeichi, said at a press conference that the RIKEN authors agreed to retract. But a statement from the authors only said they were discussing the possibility.

This case has generated a lot of interest in the Japanese general media, as well as science media around the world. Check out Nature News for a look at the scene from a press conference RIKEN held on Friday.

[RIKEN, Nature News]

Skinsuit Undergoes Zero-G Tests

Researchers tested the Gravity Loading Countermeasure Skinsuit during zero-gravity flights.

Julia Attias on Twitter

It's not just for the sexiness. (Although obvs it is very stylish and attractive, right??) This experimental space outfit's skintight design compresses the body, mimicking the effects of gravity. The suit's makers hope it will reduce the bone and muscle mass loss astronauts experience after spending time in low gravity.

The BBC has a new video describing the suit, which has been years in the making. Called the Gravity Loading Countermeasure Skinsuit, it has hundreds of Spandex-like layers, King's College London physiologist David Green told the BBC. It even compresses more firmly lower down on the legs, which normally feels more pressure from the weight of the body above it, than upper regions of the body. Green and his colleagues envision astronauts will wear the suit while hanging around inside spacecraft, thus getting a dose of gravity-like pressure while they go about their daily tasks. The suit should work in conjunction with the exercises astronauts already perform to stay healthy in space. Even with the exercises astronauts perform now, they lose bone and muscle mass they live in a low-gravity environment. That can make a return to Earth painful. Astronauts may even have pain while in space, as their spines lengthen in the absence of gravity.

The Gravity Loading Countermeasure Skinsuit may soon be tested in space. If Earthside experiments are promising, Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen will take a Skinsuit with him on his trip to the International Space Station in 2015. U.K. astronaut Tim Peake may also wear a Skinsuit on the same mission, the BBC reports.

Other Iterations of the Gravity Loading Countermeasure Skinsuit

MIT/James Waldie

Researchers at MIT first published a paper describing the concept for the Skinsuit in 2010. They also developed prototypes, which Popular Science reported on at that time. Researchers at King's College London are now performing experiments—including zero-gravity flights—to check whether the suit really does slow bone loss.

Russian astronauts aboard the International Space Station do sometimes wear another spacesuit that's designed to mimic gravity. But the MIT creators of the Skinsuit seemed skeptical of the Russian design, which is called the Pingvin, or "Penguin," suit. "Despite use since the 1970s and Russian faith in the device, the effectiveness of the suit in preserving bone mass has not been quantified," James Waldie and Dava Newman wrote in their 2010 paper.

Hopefully, tests of the Skinsuit will provide firmer answers—and a firm boost for humans to take on longer missions, including flights to Mars. 

Laser antenna

Robert Forward's proposed free-space laser antenna to detect gravity waves from the Crab Nebula. Central satellite of three has laser and beam splitter. Two outer spacecraft have reflectors.

Bill Bourne/ Popular Science archives

Today, March 17, 2014, scientists announced they had detected gravitational waves using a telescope at the South Pole—the first direct evidence of the cosmic inflation that created our universe. "The Tantalizing Quest For Gravity Waves," written by Arthur Fisher and originally published in the April 1981 issue of Popular Science magazine, explores the international effort to detect these ripples in space-time. 

In the vast reaches of the cosmos, cataclysms are a commonplace: Something momentous is always happening. Perhaps the blazing death of an exhausted sun, or the collision of two black holes, or a warble deep inside a neutron star. Such an event spews out a torrent of radiation bearing huge amounts of energy. The energy rushes through space, blankets our solar system, sweeps through the Earth . . . and no one notices.

But there is a small band of experimenters, perhaps 20 groups worldwide, scattered from California to Canton, determined that some day they will notice. Pushed to the edge of contemporary technology and beyond, battling the apparent limits of natural law itself, they are developing what will be the most sensitive antennas ever built. And eventually, they are sure, they will detect these maddeningly intangible phenomena—gravity waves.

Even though gravity waves (more formally called gravitational radiation) have never been directly detected, virtually the entire scientific community is convinced they exist. This assurance stems, in part, from the bedrock on which gravity-wave notions are founded: Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, which, though still being tested, remains untoppled. Says Caltech astrophysicist Kip Thorne, "I don't know of any respectable expert in gravitational theory who has any doubt that gravity waves exist. The only way we could be mistaken would be if Einstein's general relativity theory were wrong and if all the competing theories were also wrong, because they also predict gravity waves."

In 1916, Einstein predicted that when matter accelerated in a suitable way, the moving mass would launch ripples in the invisible mesh of space-time, tugging momentarily at each point in the universal sea as they passed by. The ripples—gravity waves—would carry energy and travel at the speed of light.

In many ways, this prediction was analogous to one made by James Clerk Maxwell, the brilliant British physicist who died in the year of Einstein's birth—1879. Maxwell stated that the acceleration of an electric charge would produce electromagnetic radiation—a whole gamut of waves, including light, that would all travel at the same constant velocity. His ideas were ridiculed by many of his contemporaries. But a mere decade after his death, he was vindicated when Heinrich Hertz both generated and detected radio waves in the laboratory.

Why, then, more than 60 years after Einstein's bold forecast, has no one seen a gravity wave? Why, despite incredible obstacles, are physicists still seeking them in a kind of modern quest for the Holy Grail, one of the most exciting in the whole history of science?

To find out, I visited experimenters who are building gravity-wave detectors and theoreticians whose esoteric calculations guide them. In the process, I learned about the problems, and how the attempts to solve them are already producing useful spinoffs. And I learned about the ultimate payoff if the quest is successful: a new and potent tool for penetrating, for the first time, what one physicist has called "the most overwhelming events in the universe."

A kiss blown across the Pacific

The fundamental problem in gravity-wave detection is that gravity as a force is feeble in the extreme, some 40 orders of magnitude weaker than the electromagnetic force. (That's 10⁴⁰, or a 1 followed by 40 zeros.)

Partly for this reason, and partly because of other properties of gravity waves, they interact with matter very weakly, making their passage almost imperceptible. And unlike the dipole radiation of electromagnetism, gravitational radiation is quadrupole.

The fundamental problem in gravity-wave detection is that gravity as a force is feeble in the extreme.

If a gravity wave generated, for example, by a supernova in our galaxy passed through the page you are now reading, the quadrupole effect would first make the length expand and the width contract (or vice versa), and then the reverse. But the amount of energy deposited in the page would be so infinitesimal that the change in dimension would be less than the diameter of a proton. Trying to detect a gravity wave, then, is like standing in the surf at Big Sur and listening for a kiss blown across the Pacific.

As for generating detectable waves on Earth, a la Hertz, theoreticians long ago dismissed the possibility. "Sure, you make gravity waves every time you wave your fist," says Rainer Weiss, a professor of physics at MIT. "But anything you will ever be able to detect must be made by massive bodies moving very fast. That means events in space." Astrophysicists have worked up whole catalogs of such events, each associated with gravity waves of different energy, different characteristic frequencies, and different probabilities of occurrence. They include the supposed continuous background gravitational radiation of the "big bang" that began the universe, and periodic events like the regular pulses of radiation emitted by pulsars and binary systems consisting of superdense objects. And then there are the singular events: the births of black holes in globular clusters, galactic nuclei, and quasars; neutron-star quakes; and supernovas.

Probably the prime candidate for detection is what William Fairbank, professor of physics at Stanford University, calls "the most dramatic event in the history of the universe"—a supernova. As a star such as our sun ages, it converts parts of its mass into nuclear energy, perhaps one percent in five billion years. "The only reason a large star like the sun doesn't collapse," explains Fairbank, "is because the very high temperature in its core generates enough pressure to withstand gravitational forces. But as it cools from burning its fuel, the gravitational forces begin to overcome the electrical forces that keep its particles apart. It collapses faster and faster, and if it's a supernova, the star's outer shell blasts off. In the last thousandth of a second, it collapses to a neutron star, and if the original star exceeded three solar masses, maybe to a black hole."

One way of characterizing the energy of a gravity wave is the strain it induces in any matter it impinges on. If the mass has a dimension of a given length, then the strain equals the change in that length (produced by the gravity wave) divided by the length. Gravity waves have very, very tiny strains. A supernova occurring in our galaxy might produce a strain on Earth that would shrink or elongate a 100-cm-long detector only one one-hundredth the diameter of an atomic nucleus. (That is 10^-15 cm, and physicists would label the strain as 10^-17.) To the credit of tireless experimenters, there are detectors capable of sensing that iota of a minim of a scruple.

But there is a catch: Based on observations of other galaxies, a supernova can be expected to occur in the dense center of any given galaxy roughly about once in 30 years. That is a depressingly long interval. Over and over again, the scientists I spoke to despaired of doing meaningful work if it had to depend on such a rara avis. Professor David Douglass of the University of Rochester told me: "To build an experiment to detect an event once every 30 years—maybe—is not a very satisfying occupation. It's hardly a very good Ph.D. project for a graduate assistant; it's not even a good career project—you might be unlucky."

Gravity waves: powerful astronomical tools?

What if we don't confine ourselves to events in our own galaxy, but look farther afield? Instead of the "hopelessly rare" (in the words of one researcher) supernova in our galaxy, what if we looked for them in a really large arena— the Virgo cluster, which has some 2,500 galaxies, where supernovas ought to be popping from once every few days to once a month or so? That's Catch-22². The Virgo cluster is about 1,000 times farther away than the center of our own galaxy. So a supernova event from the cluster would dispatch gravity waves whose effect on Earth would be some million times weaker (1,000 times 1,000, according to the inverse-square law governing all radiative energy). And that means building a detector a million times more sensitive. "There is no field of science," says Ronald Drever of Caltech and the University of Glasgow, Scotland, "where such enormous increases in sensitivity are needed as they are here, in gravity-wave detection." Trying to detect a supernova in a distant galaxy means having to measure a displacement one-millionth the size of an atomic nucleus.

Paradoxically, it is this very quality that gives gravity waves the ability to be, as Kip Thorne says, "a very powerful tool for astronomy. True, they go through a gravity-wave detector with impunity. But that means the gravity waves generated during the birth of a black hole can also get away through all the surrounding matter with impunity." And neither light, nor gamma rays, nor radio waves can. During a supernova we can see the exploding shell via showers of electromagnetic radiation, but only hours or days after the initial massive implosion—the gravitational collapse. During the collapse, while a neutron star or black hole is being formed, nothing but gravity waves (and, theoretically, neutrinos) can escape.

Read the rest of the article in the April 1981 issue of Popular Science magazine. 

A Scrabble game

thebarrowboy via Wikiemedia Commons

Robots that can win at games (as complex as chess) are nothing new. But what about a robot that acts more humanlike--that talks trash? Carnegie Mellon University professor Reid Simmons and his students have created a Scrabble-playing robot named Victor that talks to its human opponents, and often insults them, according to the Wall Street Journal. Especially when it's losing. 

Simmons began work on Victor five years ago, and taught it how to play Scrabble, since it is a game with which most people are familiar. He intended to make it fun to compete against. "He was very insulting in a funny way," said Brynn Flynn, a graduate student who recently played Victor. 

Victor is pretty good, but not too good. While human players can use all 178,691 words that are allowable in North American Scrabble tournaments, Victor is limited to 8,592 words taken from "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," a book Simmons liked as a teenager, the Journal noted. 

Here are some of Victor's best insults: 

• "Since you're human, I guess you think that's a pretty good move."
• When a human played the word "mitering," earning a 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles: "I can't believe your feeble mind was able to play that word."
• When a human opponent tried to pass of a word that wasn't in the dictionary: "This is not happy land of make believe. We only use real words."

Read the full story at the Wall Street Journal. 

Graffiti "Internet" on the wall in Vodice, Croatia.

Ronald Eikelenboom, via Wikimedia Commons

On Friday, the United States announced some very big news in a very boring way. The U.S. government is relinquishing its last official control over the internet. The phrasing chosen by the Department of Commerce announces its intent "to transition key Internet domain name functions to the global multistakeholder community."

Here's what that means. The U.S. government is giving up control over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN is the body that coordinates unique names for websites, making it responsible for the closest thing there is to fixed locations on the internet. For years, ICANN has contracted that function out to the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration. It's a wordy jumble for a vital function: Without the locations, browsers can't find sites. And a site that can't be found is a site that, for all intents and purposes, doesn't exist on the internet.

The announcement means that the U.S. is giving up the power to make sites disappear by unlisting them. ICANN is now going to transition from a private organization where the U.S. government had a major stake to a more international institution, creating system for global governance of the internet. The U.S. will still have a hand in how that transition shakes out; the contract that gives U.S. control is set to expire in one year, but there's the possibility of extending it if the transition plan isn't ready by then. While Washington is giving up explicit power over the internet, expect it to still have some have some power in that domain.

Graphene

Nokia

Nobody has made night-vision contact lenses yet… but here's a glimpse at how that technology might work, if it ever comes to be.

University researchers have created a super-light, super-thin material that detects infrared light. Infrared includes the wavelengths of light that, in part, help night-vision goggles see warmer objects in the dark. In the future, a material like this could fit into a number of interesting devices. "It can be stacked on a contact lens or integrated with a cell phone," lead researcher Zhaohui Zhong said in a statement.

For now, Zhong and his team's accomplishment is getting graphene to emit a stronger signal after absorbing infrared light. Graphene—a material composed of a single layer of carbon atoms—is able to absorb a wide spectrum of wavelengths of light, including infrared. Normally, however, graphene absorbs very little of what hits it, producing a weak signal as a result. For any kind of graphene optical device to work, it has to get a strong signal from its graphene detector.

Zhong and a team of three other engineers at the University of Michigan constructed a material consisting of two layers of graphene separated by an insulating layer. That material reacted more strongly to infrared light, producing an electrical field that the team measured to deduce how much infrared was hitting it.

The material worked at room temperature, which is another accomplishment because previous attempts to amp up graphene's light detection required the graphene to be cooled to far below freezing. It also worked for a wide range of infrared wavelengths.  Infrared detectors in use now are narrower in range, with different materials specializing in detecting near-infrared and mid-infrared wavelengths.

Zhong and his team published their work in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

[University of Michigan]

Pinnochio

People's noses don't grow when they lie, but smarter people may be better at choosing who to trust.

Walt Disney via Wikimedia Commons

Conventional wisdom has a few things to say about trusting strangers--all things being equal, it isn't generally considered a wise thing to do. Perhaps surprisingly, then, new research has found a strong link between intelligence and general trust in others.

The study, published in PLOS ONE, looked at people's generalized trust in others and intelligence, based on responses to the General Social Survey, a poll carried out in the United States every one to two years. The researchers gauged respondents' level of trust by the answer to this question: “Generally speaking would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” Intelligence was measured by a 10-word vocabulary test (multiple studies show vocabulary is correlated with intelligence), and the pollster's rating of how well the respondent understood the questions. 

Why might there be a link between intelligence and trust in others? "One explanation is that intelligent individuals are better at evaluating others’ trustworthiness, meaning that they tend to select into relationships with people who are unlikely to betray their trust," the authors wrote. Stated another way, smarter people might be more selective about who they trust. Secondly, more intelligent people "may be better at identifying when any particular person would be likely to act untrustworthily, based on the characteristics of the prospective interaction." For example, if you give thousands to somebody you just met on Craigslist, there is a chance they might just disappear with your money. Even if they seemed reliable. 

Those who are generally more trusting also report being happier and healthier. Could this link be largely due to the newfound connection with intelligence? No, researchers concluded--after controlling for intelligence, people who are more trusting also appear to be generally more happy and healthy. 

The Virtues Of Curiosity

Marius Bugge

Albert Einstein had no shortage of colorful quotes, but my favorite is perhaps his best known. In a letter to the biographer Carl Seelig in 1952, he wrote, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” When Einstein penned those words, he was already the world’s most celebrated scientist, the winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize, and one of the creators of modern physics. Yet he fobbed off his achievements on something as seemingly pedestrian as curiosity.

He wasn’t alone. Scientists from Newton on have waxed poetic about curiosity’s role in discovery. Books extol the virtues of the childlike mind. There’s even a design conference dedicated to the power of play. I’m not one to judge, but despite coming from famously scientific minds, this all strikes me as rather unscientific. Curious, I decided to investigate.

As a species, humans manifest a quality called neoteny, the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. Neoteny has physical ramifications—scarce body hair and a flat face are two examples—but it also has neurological ones. Namely, we have an extraordinary capacity to continue learning throughout life. 

If neoteny helps to explain our ability to learn, researchers are now figuring out what drives us to take advantage of it. In 2008, a group of scientists set up a novel fMRI study. When a sub­ject’s curiosity was piqued by a question (“What is the only country in the world that has a bill of rights for cows?” for instance), certain regions of the brain lit up. Those areas, known collectively as the basal ganglia, correspond to the brain’s reward centers—the same ones that govern our desire for sex or chocolate or total domination in Call of Duty 4. When people say they have an itch to figure something out, they’re not speaking metaphorically. They’re looking to get high on information.

Curiosity, then, is not some romantic quality. It is an adaptive response. Humans may not be the fastest or strongest creatures, but through the blind luck of evolution, we developed the desire and capacity to continually update our understanding of the world. And that has allowed us to master it—or get darn close. Call it the biological basis for being a nerd. 

Our job as editors of Popular Science is to satisfy that innate craving on every page of every issue. In that regard, our annual How It Works issue is the equivalent of crack cocaine. Want to know how to put a rover on the moon? Go to page 40. Want to understand the inner workings of our planet, the process behind “pink slime,” or why a Wiffle ball takes such an unpredictable path? We explain that too. In 10 glorious pages, we dissect and demystify the world around us. 

Will you gain a selective ad­van­tage from understanding the nuances of a surgical snakebot? Probably not. But again, I’ll defer to Einstein on this one. “The important thing is to not stop questioning,” he said. “Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”

Enjoy the issue.

Click here to read the April 2014 issue. 

Apollo 8's famous Earthrise

NASA

Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilizational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."

The study, soon to be published in the journal Ecological Economics, identified five factors crucial to civilization's survival: population, climate, water, agriculture, and energy. In all such cases of civilization collapse, these factors have converged to stretch "resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity," and have caused a stratification of society into elites and "commoners," the researchers wrote. And that is what is happening currently, they added. 

The reseachers do point out, however, that worst-case scenarios are not inevitable, and that changes could prevent collapse, or even "pave the way" toward a sustainable civilization. 

 The Guardian concludes: 

The NASA-funded [study] offers a highly credible wake-up call to governments, corporations and business--and consumers--to recognize that 'business as usual' cannot be sustained, and that policy and structural changes are required immediately.

You should really head over to the Guardian for the full story; it's worth reading. 

via Washington Post

Here is your weekly dose of NSA revelations, reported in the Washington Post from the classified documents cache released by Edward Snowden: the NSA has a program called MYSTIC that can monitor an entire country's telephone calls--100 percent of them--and replay them up to a month later. It's actually in use in a country right now, although it can't be said which one. 

The program's tool, RETRO, for “retrospective retrieval,” stores a bank of phone conversations; every 30 days, it clears out the oldest conversations to make way for new ones. The documents reveal the program is in use somewhere, but at the bequest of the NSA, the Post is withholding the country's identity for security reasons. The NSA documents outlined plans to add the operation in six other countries, also redacted by the Post. (Safe to assume there aren't too many countries out there who'd be happy about being part of this.) Only a small percentage of the calls are ever accessed, but there are apparently few limitations on the program: any calls from Americans caught in the foreign country's dragnet are also subject to collection. 

Now, here is the bizarre twist: the documents include this image of a wizard with a cell phone mounted on the end of his staff. Twitter detective work by Steve Tsuida finds that the MYSTIC image is in fact a painting stolen in 1995 from fantasy artist Don Maitz, who is also famous for creating the image of rum pirate Captain Morgan. (Update: Janny Wurts, a fantasy novelist and illustrator married to Maitz, confirmed on Twitter that the image was used without permission.)

[Washington Post]

Illustration of an Underground Home Living Room, with an 'Outdoor' View Screened Onto the Windows

From the Underground Home pamphlet, hosted online by nywf64.com

Is the Underground Home still underground? The New York City Parks Department doesn't think so, but others do. The home, built as an exhibit for the 1964-1965 World's Fair held in New York, has ardent fans who think it's still buried underneath the city's Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. Now, one expert is seeking the permits and funding to do a radar and/or camera survey to check.

As a certain fictional FBI agent would say, we want to believe. Why not? The Underground Home was a 12,000-square-foot, totally underground house built in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as Narratively reported in 2012. With an air filtering system its makers advertised as able to filter fallout particles, the Underground Home tapped into American fears of the times. In addition, the home had 10 rooms, windows made of screens that could show different scenes, and a Steinway piano. The Underground Home was both weird and baller.  

It may also still be around. You should check out the Narratively story to learn about how, why, and those who want to find out.

Among the would-be discoverers is historian Lori Walters of the University of Central Florida. Last month, Walters talked with Inhabitat about her plans for surveying the stretch of dirt where the Underground Home may lie buried:

'Ground penetrating radar would be a non-invasive first step to determine what might remain of the underground structure,' she explained. 'Soil type may not permit us to conclusively determine the structure's existence. The goal is not to uncover the Underground Home nor to provide full access to it. The greatest extent of exploration would be through an endoscopic camera and should that reveal an interior that is traversable . . . .'

Should Walters get to do her project, ordinary folks may get to take a look, too. The historian told Inhabitat she wants to set up the endoscopic camera so that visitors to the New York Hall of Science are able to control it. She hopes the project will teach kids about archaeology. She previously worked on creating a 3-D rendering of the World's Fair grounds, so modern kids can "visit" the fair and get excited about science and technology. You can download the virtual fairgrounds for free online.

[Narratively, Inhabitat, University of Central Florida]

Tuo Jiang's Two Hulls

Ministry of National Defense, Republic of China

Delivered last Friday, Taiwan’s new twin-hulled Tuo Jiang weighs 551 tons, carries 41 crewmembers, and is designed specifically to destroy aircraft carriers. Classified as a “missile corvette,” it’s the Republic of China’s answer to the People’s Republic Of China's growing carrier fleet. Oh, and it is also stealth.

The Tuo Jiang can go up to 44 miles per hour, and it has a range of 2,300 miles. It's almost 200 feet long by 45 feet wide. The two-hulled design makes it a catamaran, and the ship's combination of odd angles and flat surfaces give it a low radar profile, like that of the U.S. Navy's Zumwalt destroyer. The ship is also reportedly built using special radar-refractive materials that make it even stealthier.

On the forward bow, the Tuo Jiang has a 76-mm rapid-fire gun, primarily for shooting smaller boats and incoming missiles. The Tuo Jiang will fight primarily by missiles. The class is reportedly designed to carry up to eight Hsiung Feng III supersonic anti-ship missiles, each of which can travel more than 80 miles to hit their target. The stealth and range of the Tuo Jiang class make it a threat to mainland China's growing fleet of aircraft carriers.

Taiwan plans to build 12 of the Tuo Jiang class missile corvettes, with the eponymous vessel expected to deploy in early 2015. The class, designed by Taiwanese shipbuilding company Lung Teh and using a natively built missile, could also become a military export for the country, helping it secure allies against growing Chinese Pacific influence through cheaper countermeasures.