Category: science

Image via Wikipedia

Apparently, the sun makes music:

For the first time, astronomers have found that the magnetic field in
the outer atmosphere of the Sun produces eerie musical harmonies — a
discovery that could provide new ways of understanding and predicting
solar flares before they happen.

Scientists at the University of
Sheffield found that huge magnetic loops that have been observed coiling
away from the outer layer of the Sun’s atmosphere — known as coronal
loops — vibrate like strings on a musical instrument.

You can read more here (although, unfortunately, you can’t listen).

Image by goosmurf via Flickr

This news is a little old, but irregardless, it creeps me out (most likely due to the subject itself). From the BBC:

Earthworms form herds and make “group decisions”,
scientists have discovered.

The earthworms use touch to
communicate and influence each other’s behaviour, according to research
published in the journal Ethology.

By doing so the worms
collectively decide to travel in the same direction as part of a single
herd.

The striking behaviour, found in the earthworm Eisenia
fetida, is the first time that any type of worm, or annelid, has
been shown to form active herds.

You can read more here.

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In 1993, thousands of Milwaukee residents began falling mysteriously ill – experiencing stomach cramps, dehydration, fever, diarrhea, and even death. Investigators identified the outbreak’s culprit as cryptosporidium, a protozoan parasite that attacks the intestines of mammals. The vehicle for infection? The city’s water supply. While steps were quickly taken to remedy the contaminated water supply, the incident nonetheless sicked more than 400,000 Milwaukee residents and killed 53, making it the largest waterborne disease outbreak in U.S. history.

After some investigation, city inspectors
realized the city water supply had been contaminated by cryptosporidium,
which various testing and filtering systems had failed to detect and
screen out.

The story was at the top of every local
newscast for some days, and weeks later many people were still boiling
water or avoiding tap water altogether. The story was tragic news for
those with compromised immune systems, and was one more complication in
the attempt to maintain the health and well-being of thousands of local
people infected with HIV and with AIDS. For many of these, as well as
others with compromised immune systems, the contamination was fatal.

The story went national, and 12 years later was still cited in
national news stories and scientific studies regarding the safety of
city water supplies, or of “when things go wrong”. (12 years later the
author still hears people say they haven’t drunk Milwaukee tap water
since.)

The City of Milwaukee and State of Wisconsin made numerous changes to
filtration and testing procedures in an attempt to ensure such a
tragedy can never happen again. One of the simplest is to incerease the
frequency of testing for, and acceptable level of, turbidity
(cloudiness) in drinking water.

You can read more here and here.
In the meantime, 2 million residents of the Boston metropolitan area have been ordered to boil their water because it is unsafe for human consumption due to a huge catastrophic break in a major pipe. No cryptosporidium there, but certainly inconvenient and at least a bit unnerving (people have been making runs on stores and buying every single case of water bottles).

Apparently the Census of Marine Life, the Herculean scientific effort to identify, categorize, and describe all ocean life, has discovered a “vast carpet” of bacteria on the ocean floor off the coast of South America.

I don’t think words can convey how huge this bacterial mass is, but journalists have tried. From ABC News:

 The census estimated there were a mind-boggling “nonillion” — or
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (30 zeroes) — individual
microbial cells in the oceans, weighing as much as 240 billion African
elephants, the biggest land animal.
[…]The census said they carpeted an area the size of Greece — about
130,000 sq km (50,000 sq miles) or the size of the U.S. state of Alabama. Toxic to humans, the bacteria are food for shrimp or worms and so underpin rich Pacific fish stocks.

Certainly creepy. And Ann Bucklin, head of the Census of Marine Zooplankton, points out that “seventy percent of the oceans are deeper than 1,000 meters [and] the deep layer is the source of the hidden diversity.” Who knows what else is down there – we only just now discovered this Greece-sized mass.

You can read more here, and here and here.
See also our somewhat-related earlier article on mucilages (free-floating blobs of ocean bacteria).

NPR reports:

By downloading a free program, you and your laptop
could help researchers pinpoint earthquakes and even sound an early
warning to surrounding areas.

Newer models of laptops manufactured by companies
like Apple and Lenovo contain accelerometers — motion sensors meant to
detect whether the computer has been dropped. If the computer falls, the
hard drive will automatically switch off to protect the user’s data.

“As soon as I knew there were these low-cost
sensors inside these accelerometers, I thought it would be perfect to
use them to network together and actually record earthquakes,”
geoscientist Elizabeth Cochran of the University of California at
Riverside says.

So if you’ve got one of those newer laptops, download the program here. Given the increased seismic activity lately, it could come in handy.

More Antarctic news:

In a surprising discovery about where higher
life can thrive, scientists found a shrimplike creature and a jellyfish
frolicking beneath an Antarctic ice sheet.

Six hundred feet below the ice where no light
shines, they had figured nothing much more than a few microbes could
exist. That’s why a NASA team was surprised when it lowered a video
camera to get the first long look at the underbelly of the ice sheet in
Antarctica, and a 3-inch shrimp-like creature went swimming by and then
parked itself on the camera’s cable. Scientists also pulled up a
tentacle they believe came from a foot-long jellyfish.

“We were operating on the presumption that
nothing’s there,” said NASA scientist Robert Bindschadler, who will
present the initial findings and a video at an American Geophysical
Union meeting tomorrow.

Read more here.

MIT’s Technology Review recently published this relatively unnerving finding (it would be more unnerving if the hypothetical event wasn’t 1.5 million years in the future):

An orange dwarf star called Gliese 710 is heading our way and will
arrive sometime within the next 1.5 million years.

Of course, trajectories are difficult to calculate when the data is
poor so nobody has really been sure about what’s going to happen.

What the new data has allowed Bobylev to do is calculate the
probability of Gliese 710 smashing into the Solar System. What he’s
found is a shock.

He says there is 86 percent chance that Gliese 710 will plough
through the Oort Cloud of frozen stuff that extends some 0.5 parsecs
into space.

That may sound like a graze but it is likely to have serious
consequences. Such an approach would send an almighty shower of comets
into the Solar System which will force us to keep our heads down for a
while. And a probability of 86 percent is about as close to certainty as
this kind of data can get.

The article is a bit sparse on details, but you can read the rest here.

In keeping with our ongoing coverage of all things Antarctic, we ask this pressing question: is Antarctica falling apart? (Judging by our last few posts, it certainly seems wounded). From LiveScience:

Recent news of mammoth icebergs the size of small U.S. states
breaking off Antarctica may sound dire. But those events mostly
represent business as usual at the world’s southernmost continent,
scientists say.

A massive iceberg the size of the state of Rhode Island collided with Antarctica’s Mertz Glacier in mid-February, and caused a huge new iceberg
with an estimated mass of 860 billion metric tons to break off the
glacial tongue. Scientists note that such dramatic examples have not
been uncommon over the past decade.

“I need to stress that the event in the Mertz area, and indeed most of the iceberg calving
in Antarctica is a completely normal, expected activity for a stable
ice sheet,” said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and
Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.

So perhaps not. Icebergs do break off all the time, although this one is of an unusually large size. LiveScience goes on to note, however, that “a new report by
the U.S. Geological Survey suggests that every ice front in the
southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula — the coolest part of the
peninsula — has been retreating overall from 1947 to 2009. The most
dramatic changes have taken place since 1990.” You can read the whole article here.