Storm rolling

Space dreamer answers childhood call to destiny

A NASA / DARPA plan is underway to launch a "100-year" spaceship for deep space exploration. But while that's interesting of itself, I was struck by this wild anecdote:

"When Jack Sarfatti was 13 years old, he began receiving phone calls from a strange metallic voice that told him he would someday become part of an elite group of scientists exploring uncharted territory. Those calls, which he believes may have come from a computer on a spacecraft, proved a seminal influence on his life and led him to pursue a career that combined mainstream physics with an enduring interest in UFOs and the far-out reaches of science."

The program is just one of many ambitious attempts to kick the human race into its interstellar travel era. So far, Voyager is still the most distant man-made object in the universe, and it's just crossing the threshold out of our solar system. As Cecil Adams points out in this Straight Dope column:

"Then again, the thinking goes, if you can pinpoint where to look, you can accomplish seemingly miraculous feats. Just ask the project team for Voyager 1, which is still communicating with a spacecraft so far away its incoming radio signals have less than a twenty-billionth the power of a watch battery.

But let’s put that in perspective. Voyager 1 is the most distant manmade object in the universe, far beyond the orbit of Pluto. It’ll soon leave the outer reaches of the solar system behind and enter the depths of interstellar space. Even so, another 14,000 years will have to pass before Voyager attains a distance of one light year from earth. The star closest to us, Proxima Centauri, is more than four light years away."

...so at present technology, 100 years will be long enough to get, meh, a stone's throw from Earth, relatively speaking.

However, getting our space legs on might be a necessity at some point in the future, especially if we want to do anything about threats like 29075-1950-DA, the asteroid which has the greatest probability of hitting earth. It's only expected to muss our hair sometime about the year 2880, but it's still much too soon from now to comfortably put it off.

Here's a little presentation on this asteroid and other near-Earth objects, just to scare you a little bit:

For a morbid (but educational) time, read OSHA's published workplace fatalities report

OSHA (Occupational Safety & Health Administration) publishes weekly industrial accident reports on their site. A handful of some mind--blowing fatalities:

• "Employee crushed and killed by conveyor belt rollers undergoing maintenance."
• "Worker was killed when nail from a nail gun struck him in the eye."
• "Employee died after an explosion occurred while he was checking levels on a 400 barrel brine water holding tank."
• "Worker died after being caught in a stamping machine."
• "Worker was crushed to death when the trash compactor he was repairing was energized."
• "Worker died after being hit by several cars while handing out flyers."
• "Worker died after collapsing on the ground with seizures while working in a tobacco field with a heat index of 108 degrees."
• "Worker died after falling eight feet when the core drilling machine he was using hit rebar."
• "Worker died from exposure to hydrogen sulfide after stepping into 5-foot-deep hole containing oil slush."
• "Employee died from head injuries after a concrete block fell from a ceiling being repaired."

And those are just from this year!

And since you're here, here's some gruesome (but effective) workplace safety PSAs around YouTube:

There, now you'll NEVER go to work again! Happy Friday!

Radioactive Christmas trees

For this festive holiday season which we just kicked off today, we celebrate a time when radioactive Christmas trees were an actual headline - another side effect of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine. This story from 2002...

"Officials seized the fir trees at local markets in the southern town of Rovno, where they were being sold for the upcoming Orthodox Christmas, Itar-Tass agency reported.

"The nuclear disaster at Chernobyl was the world's worst
After the region was covered by a radioactive cloud, a complete ban on the felling of trees in the contaminated forests surrounding Chernobyl was imposed.

"Police said the local businessmen knew the trees from the Zhytomyr region were contaminated, and used forged documents to sell them. "

The fallout from Chernobyl was felt in many ways that were unexpected. The incident and area today provide an outstanding living experiment in just what happens to the environment after a nuclear meltdown. But along with this has come a tragic toll of death and weird tragedy - (warning, that page contains an image of a mutated puppy).

Titanium Cat

It's like this cat doesn't even feel the impact and casually strolls off. Imagine explaining this one to the insurance company...

The latest dirt on remote-controlled cockroaches

"Biobots" "roboroach", and "cyborg roaches" are just a few of the names being given to the emerging technology of driving a remote-controlled cockroach for useful purposes... such as searching for earthquake survivors. As the linked article reasons, why go to the trouble of building a robot to crawl through rubble when nature has already given us a perfect design that's more than up to the task? Roaches can squeeze through tight spaces and seamlessly traverse walls, edges, ceilings, and just about any shape, right side up or upside down! Even our best designs are still years from accomplishing this.

There's a video at that link. Here's a few more examples of this bizarre field of research (trigger warning for anybody with entomophobia):

As this video shows, you could easily make this a flying unit with a little helicopter rigging:

You could also help them on their way by giving them their own ground vehicle to pilot:

And before everyone starts yelling about "cruelty to animals": (1) They're bugs. They process pain/discomfort differently than we do (and how do we know they aren't having a blast anyway?) (2) From exterminators to flyswatters to electronic bug-zappers, we've been killing bugs off en mass practically since we first found one, and nobody's protested yet. Don't pick a time when we're doing important things in science with them to get high-and-mighty now.

The mystery radiation burst of ~774-775 A.D.

 

During a time when very few humans would have had the presence of mind or equipment to detect such an event, one species faithfully recorded this freak occurrence for our puzzlement millenniums later: Japanese ceder trees. The evidence of this event is told by the pattern of tree rings in this species, which shows a huge anomaly right around this time in history. There is a massive amount of activity from carbon-14, an element only presented when massive amounts of radiation from space bombard earth's atmosphere.

Sometime around 774 or 775 A.D., a mysterious burst of radiation hit the Earth. We have no idea what caused it, where it came from, or why it went otherwise undetected.

A supernova would be a possible explanation, but early astronomers show no record of such an event visible from Earth during this time, despite having noted supernovas in 1006 and 1054. For that matter, we'd still be able to find evidence of a supernova from this time today. A solar flare could also explain it, but again no solar flare of such a large and devastating nature would have come and gone without somebody noticing it. If you're picking up the theme here, huge bursts of radiation have to be caused by a star or something as big and hot as a star.

Other tree species around the world, as well as ice core samples from the polar regions, bear a similar record about the same time period in history. So either we had an invisible, undetectable solar flare or supernova, or we have a bunch of lying trees on our hands.

77,000 Years Ago, Humanity Was Almost Wiped Out By A Volcano

What you see here is Lake Toba, a donut-shaped lake which now fills the crater left in Sumatra, Indonesia, when a supervolcanic eruption happened about 77,000 years ago. This eruption blasted volcanic ash into the Earth's atmosphere, coating the entirety of South Asia in a 15-centimeter blanket of ash, as well as depositing ash over nearby oceans and seas. This resulted in a volcanic winter over the Earth, which lasted for as long as a decade, and potentially brought about a millennium-long global cooling event as well.

During this time, it appears that most of the human race was wiped out, with the population count getting as low as 1000 breeding pairs of humans.

In 1993, scientist Ann Gibbons first hypothesized that the bottleneck in human population, followed by the Pleistocene population explosion, could have been linked to the Toba event. Geneticist Lynn Jorde, in this BBC interview on supervolcanoes, echoes this idea:

"Our population may have been in such a precarious position that only a few thousand of us may have been alive on the whole face of the Earth at one point in time, that we almost went extinct, that some event was so catastrophic as to nearly cause our species to cease to exist completely."

In a population bottleneck, as the graph on this Wiki shows, a vast majority of a species is killed off, leaving only a few stragglers to either adapt and proser, or perish.

The possibility exists that such a global catastrophe could nudge along natural selection in favor of intelligence. It does stand to reason, after all, that if some disaster wipes out most of humanity, that the smarter folk will have a better chance of survival, by both being better prepared and being better at adapting new survival strategies during the ensuing fallout.

A man can only be pushed so far...

On June 4th, 2004, a construction worker named Marvin Heemeyer was upset as a result of a zoning dispute in Granby, Colorado. So, what would you do? Would you picket city hall, complain about it in your blog, write your assemblymen? Heemeyer chose a more direct approach.

He pulled out of his garage in a bulldozer which he had spent months modifying himself with layers of concrete and steel, as well as mounted rifles and cameras so he could see where he was going. He then went on a rampage throughout the city, damaging property to the tune of $7 million and threatening the lives of anybody who got in his way. This was no ordinary snap to rage; he'd been planning it for months and likely was looking for an excuse to use his "Killdozer", as he called it.

Heemeyer's had a "shit list" of targets and he hit every one of them, demolishing the property of anyone in town with whom he had had a dispute, no matter how petty: his own former place of employment, the concrete plant, town hall, the local newspaper office, and the homes and businesses of individuals.

Being a modified super-villain vehicle, Heemeyer's monstrosity was unstoppable. Police fired guns and dropped flash-bang grenades to no avail. However, when the "Killdozer" became stuck in the rubble, Heemeyer shot himself inside the cab of the machine and the town's siege was ended.

His grandiose exit from this world earned him some grudging respect, some calling him "badass", and while he certainly deserves points for style, we must not forget that overall his actions were cowardly and - need we say it again? - petty. The rest of us put up with more slings and arrows from the jerks of this world without more than a grumble than what took Heemeyer over the edge. He was not getting revenge for gross injustice. He had a problem with the world, and he was determined not to solve it without going out in a blaze of "glory" to feed his petty ego.

A nightmare vision of industrial hell: MetaChaos

Darn, I wasn't even going to post today, being Easter and all. But I got bored by night and moseyed around and stumbled upon this. Least appropriate thing I've ever watched on Easter.

Months later, survivors of the March 2011 Japanese earthquake are seing ghosts

Predictably for a trauma of such massive proportions, the normally level-headed Japanese are experiencing visions of ghosts, as a result of all the death and destruction in the wake of one of history's deadliest earthquakes.

Do keep in mind that the toll racked up to over 15,000 dead and 3,380 missing. We may not all believe in ghosts, but the psychological shock from such an incident would trigger hallucinations in even the most skeptical among us.

The footage of this quake is still shocking to behold. In the second half of this video, houses are swept away like toys:

Here's a first-person view, a video takes by someone shopping in an electronics store when the quake hit:

In this Cambridge Journal article "Trauma, Metacognition And Predisposition To Hallucinations In Non-Patients", the link between auditory and visual hallucinations and post-trauma stress is explored:

"The study found an association between trauma-related measures (negative cognitions about the world and all dissociation variables) and predisposition to both auditory and visual hallucinations."