Failed dwarf galaxy survives galactic collision thanks to full dark-matter jacket

Like a bullet wrapped in a full metal jacket, a high-velocity hydrogen cloud hurtling toward the Milky Way appears to be encased in a shell of dark matter, according to a new analysis of data from the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). Astronomers believe that without this protective shell, the high-velocity cloud (HVC) known as the Smith Cloud would have disintegrated long ago when it first collided with the disk of our Galaxy.

If confirmed by further observations, a halo of dark matter could mean that the Smith Cloud is actually a failed dwarf galaxy, an object that has all the right stuff to form a true galaxy, just not enough to produce stars.

"The Smith Cloud is really one of a kind. It's fast, quite extensive, and close enough to study in detail," said Matthew Nichols with the Sauverny Observatory in Switzerland and principal author on a paper accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "It's also a bit of a mystery; an object like this simply shouldn't survive a trip through the Milky Way, but all the evidence points to the fact that it did."

Previous studies of the Smith Cloud revealed that it first passed through our Galaxy many millions of years ago. By reexamining and carefully modeling the cloud, astronomers now believe that the Smith Cloud contains and is actually wrapped in a substantial "halo" of dark matter -- the gravitationally significant yet invisible stuff that makes up roughly 80 percent of all the matter in the Universe.

"Based on the currently predicted orbit, we show that a dark matter free cloud would be unlikely to survive this disk crossing," observed Jay Lockman, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, and one of the coauthors on the paper. "While a cloud with dark matter easily survives the passage and produces an object that looks like the Smith Cloud today."

The Milky Way is swarmed by hundreds of high-velocity clouds, which are made up primarily of hydrogen gas that is too rarefied to form stars in any detectable amount. The only way to observe these objects, therefore, is with exquisitely sensitive radio telescopes like the GBT, which can detect the faint emission of neutral hydrogen. If it were visible with the naked eye, the Smith Cloud would cover almost as much sky as the constellation Orion.

Most high-velocity clouds share a common origin with the Milky Way, either as the leftover building blocks of galaxy formation or as clumps of material launched by supernovas in the disk of the Galaxy. A rare few, however, are interlopers from farther off in space with their own distinct pedigree. A halo of dark matter would strengthen the case for the Smith Cloud being one of these rare exceptions.

Read more at Science Daily

Supermassive Black Holes are Not Doughnuts!

Conventional thinking suggests that the most massive black holes possess a ringed doughnut-shaped torus of gas and dust trapped in orbit around them. But if we know one thing about black holes, they’re anything but conventional.

Now, astronomers have analyzed data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) of thousands of supermassive black holes to find that the “torus model” may be woefully inadequate when explaining what is actually going on.

Most galaxies appear to contain a supermassive black hole in their cores. With masses in the realms of millions to billions of solar masses, these objects truly are the heavyweights of our Universe. With all this mass comes a powerful gravitational field that dominates galactic cores, pulling in any matter — stars, planets, dust, gas, possibly unlucky extraterrestrials — to the black hole’s event horizon.

Interactions between infalling matter and the supermassive black holes can generate huge quantities of energy, creating what are known as active galactic nuclei, making the effects of the black hole easy to observe.

In the 1970s, astronomers developed a unified theory that could explain active supermassive black hole observations. The theory arose from the fact that some active black hole emissions could be easily seen by observatories while others seemed obscured by dust. To explain this, astronomers came up with the idea that supermassive black holes must be surrounded by a torus, or ring, of dusty material (as shown in the artistic rendering above).

Therefore, given their random orientation as observed from Earth, some rings may appear “edge on” (thereby blocking our view of the black hole) or we may be observing the ring from above (revealing the black hole).

Since this unified theory was suggested, it has generally matched observations of black holes and helped us understand how they influence the evolution of their host galaxies.

However, new analyses of WISE data — a space telescope that surveyed the infrared sky twice for a little over a year until its primary mission was complete in February 2011 — has revealed a complication to the unified theory.

As expected, after surveying 170,000 galaxies containing supermassive black holes at their cores, the WISE observations showed some black holes that could be seen, whereas others appeared obscured (in line with the torus model), but it also revealed a peculiar pattern. When looking at black holes inside massive galaxies that are clumped together as a part of galactic clusters, more supermassive black holes seemed to be obscured.

This bias toward obscured black holes in large clusters cannot be accounted for if we just consider the unified theory. Why would supermassive black holes inside galaxies that are clumped in clusters be preferentially obscured by their dusty doughnut-shaped rings?

“The main purpose of unification was to put a zoo of different kinds of active nuclei under a single umbrella,” said post-doctorate astronomer and lead researcher Emilio Donoso, of the Instituto de Ciencias Astronómicas, de la Tierra y del Espacio in Argentina. “Now, that has become increasingly complex to do as we dig deeper into the WISE data.”

Read more at Discovery News

Rapid evolution aids spread of exotic plant species

A team of Belgian biologists led by researchers at KU Leuven has provided the first genetic evidence that rapid evolution can help non-native plant species spread in new environments. Using samples of centuries-old herbaria and DNA analysis, the researchers reconstructed the genetic adaptations undergone by the Pyrenean rocket prior to its rapid spread in Belgium.

The Pyrenean rocket (Sisymbrium austriacum subsp. Chrysanthum) is a plant that grows in the mountains of southern Europe and is particularly prevalent in the Pyrenees. The species was first reported in Belgium -- 1,200 kilometres north of its native range -- in the first half of the 19th century. Seeds from the plant were most likely introduced alongside the wool industry in and around Verviers. The Pyrenean rocket took root on the banks of the River Vesdre in Verviers and later spread across the Meuse basin towards the Netherlands.

The colonization history of the Pyrenean rocket is well documented, explains postdoctoral researcher and corresponding author Katrien Vandepitte (Plant Conservation and Population Biology Research Group): "We found dried specimens of the Pyrenean rocket in herbaria from the 19th and 20th centuries and were able to isolate DNA from these samples. We then compared this DNA with the genetic profile of contemporary samples from Belgium and the Pyrenees. This gave us a unique opportunity to reconstruct when and how an exotic plant species genetically adapted to a new environment."

20 generations

"When we looked at the genetic evolution of the Pyrenean rocket, we found the greatest divergences in a set of genes that regulate flowering time, an important plant fitness trait. When we compared current individuals taken from our region and the Pyrenees, both grown under Belgian conditions, the Belgian variant bloomed later."

"Our DNA analysis shows that the Belgian variant genetically adapted quite rapidly -- in about 20 generations. This very likely helped the plant to survive and spread here."

Read more at Science Daily

Long-Lost Mummy of Pharaoh's Foster Brother Found

The mummy of the pharaoh Amenhotep II's foster brother may have been found in a former monastery, according to archival research into 19th-century documents.

The mummy, now reduced to a skeleton, is believed to be that of Qenamun, the chief steward of Amenhotep II (about 1427–1400 B.C.) who was the 7th Pharaoh of Egypt's 18th Dynasty and likely Tutankhamun's great-great-grandfather.

Qenamun was effectively Amenhotep II's foster brother, as his mother, Amenemipet, was the chief royal nurse of the future king. The two grew up together and the bond endured in adult life, with Qenamun enjoying a high and powerful status.

But the whereabouts of Qenamun's afterlife journey had remained a mystery -- no coffin nor mummy was found in his large and beautifully decorated tomb in Thebes.

"Identifying Qenamun has been like fitting together long-lost puzzle pieces," Marilina Betrò, professor of Egyptology at Pisa University, told Discovery News.

It all began two years ago when a skeleton resting in a cardboard box was found in a store room of a 14th-century monastery. Located in Calci, a village near Pisa, the monastery now houses one of the world's oldest natural history museums.

"Intriguingly, the skull bore an inscription in black ink stating it was one of the mummies brought from Egypt by Ippolito Rosellini, Europe's first Egyptology professor," Marilina Betrò told Discovery News. She holds the same chair at Pisa University that Rosellini did.

In 1828 the Pisa academic left for Egypt with Jean-Francois Champollion, the French philologist who had recently deciphered the Rosetta Stone.

Financed by the grand-duke of Tuscany, Leopold II, and the King of France, Charles X, the joint Franco-Tuscan expedition brought to Europe a treasure trove of ancient antiquities. At the same time, it yielded a survey of the monuments of Egypt and their hieroglyphic inscriptions, which, thanks to Champollion, were readable for the first time.

On Dec. 29, 1829, back from Egypt, Rosellini wrote a report to Grand Duke Leopold II. Attached to that letter was a list of 1878 antiquities he had packed for the journey back to Tuscany -- 660 were acquired by excavations, while 1,218 were purchased.

Rosellini stated he chose to take the best intact items, leaving behind several other objects because of shipping costs.

"Until a few years ago, only the draft of that letter was known, and it lacked the list. We found it in the National Archives in Prague, where all the documents of the Habsburg-Lorraine family are kept," Betrò said.

The list of the 660 antiquities began with the description of 11 mummies. Seven are currently on display in Florence's Egypt museum, while records about three others -- a woman, a man and a child -- reveal they were destroyed and never made to the Florence museum. The eleventh mummy remained a mystery.

In his report, Rosellini described the mummy as resting in a black varnished coffin with yellow painted hieroglyphs, "the body intact in its bandages." The elusive mummy was not mentioned in any later document.

"Something must have happened during the sea journey from Alexandria to Livorno," Betrò said.

Papers found among Rosellini's documents indicate the merchant ship Cleopatra faced a "long and stormy navigation" during which some of the antiquities were possibly damaged.

"Most likely, when the boxes were opened in Livorno, the mummy was no longer in condition to be brought to the grand duke," Betrò said.

"Rosellini possibly gave the mummy to his friend Paolo Savi, the director of Pisa's natural history museum, so that it could be useful to science at least," she said.

Anthropological analysis indicated the skeleton belonged to a rather tall male (5’ 9") who died around 30 years of age. The bone remains do not show any sign of disease but the head of one of the remains' femurs is enlarged and stretched.

"That's a peculiarity which is sometimes observed in those who were used to bumpy and speedy rides in chariots," anthropologist Francesco Mallegni and colleagues wrote in their report.

The skeleton was probably hung for display in the museum, as wires linking some bones suggest.

Meanwhile, parallel research in Florence's Egyptian museum revealed the presence of a black varnished coffin with yellow painted hieroglyphs which previous researches attributed as coming from Rosellini's expedition. Because of its condition, it lay almost forgotten in the museum's store rooms.

"It was so badly damaged that it wasn't recorded in the museum inventory," Maria Cristina Guidotti, director of the Egyptian museum, told Discovery News.

At a careful examination, the yellow painted hieroglyphs revealed the name of the coffin's owner as the "God's Father Qenamun."

"The very important title confirmed it belonged to Amenhotep II's foster brother," Betrò said.

The pharoah held Qenamun in such a great esteem that he had planned a magnificent funeral for him, with processions of Qenamun statues and singers of the Amon temples dancing and singing for him.

But such a memorable funeral might have never occurred. The reliefs in Qenamun's large Theban tomb were defaced and not a single image of him survived the chisel attacks.

"The skeleton suggests a disgraced Qenamun died young under the reign of his foster brother," Betrò said.

How the mummy was found by Rosellini's team remains a mystery.

During his expedition, the Pisa scholar discovered five intact tombs in the Theban necropolis; of these, two dated between the 18th dynasty and the beginning of the 19th dynasty.

Both burials were discovered in the absence of Rosellini and Champollion, who had left for Nubia. They had ordered that any intact tomb found while they were away should be left sealed and untouched until their return.

"This was done for one tomb only; the other was opened and emptied. In this tomb workers found the wonderful chariot that Rosellini brought to Florence," Betrò said.

Read more at Discovery News

There’s a Tarantula Version of the Westminster Dog Show

Just like dogs, tarantulas come in a variety of colors, sizes and demeanors. Just like dogs, they often have devoted (some might say obsessed) owners who prefer to think of themselves as caretakers. And just like dogs have the Westminster Dog Show, tarantulas have a hotly contested annual competition.

This week, the British Tarantula Society (yes it exists, here’s how you can join) held its 29th annual exhibition, the biggest tarantula event in the world. How they managed to have 28 of these previously without us noticing, I really don’t know. This event sounds amazing — there were something like 30,000 tarantulas there. Just close your eyes and think about that for a minute! I bet you didn’t even last 10 seconds with that image in your head.

While tens of thousands of these big spiders all in one place may be terrifying, individually they are quite beautiful. They have lots of different looks, and they live all over the planet, on the ground and in trees.

Entrants to this year’s spider competition were divided into eight categories and spent the day in clear containers being ogled by the 1,200 or so visitors and inspected by a panel of judges. The Best in Show, a beautiful Socotra Island Blue Baboon Tarantula, walked away with a trophy (or, at least its proud owner did) and a glamor shot on the society’s membership cards.

“It was unanimous amongst the four judges that this one was the Best In Show,” judge and chairman of the British Tarantula Society, Peter Kirk said in an email to WIRED.

Read more at Wired Science

The 2,500-Pound Snake That Devoured Gigantic Crocodiles

The social-media campaign for the discovery of titanoboa fell to pieces when an unidentified man wearing a backpack stood in front of their new hashtag for weeks on end–#mostersnake, it would seem, doesn’t mean a damn thing to anyone.

Long ago, legend has it, the god Thor and the giant Hymir rowed to sea in search of Jörmungandr, a snake so huge it circled the Earth. Thor dropped a line baited with an ox head, which Jörmungandr nommed on, and with his bare hands reeled the beast in. Once the serpent was at the edge of the boat, though, Hymir got all nervous and cut the line.

The moral of the story? I haven’t the slightest clue.

But what I do know is that 60 million years ago, in the swampy waters of what is now Colombia, there lurked a serpent of similar hyperbole: titanoboa, by far the biggest snake that ever lived. At nearly 50 feet long and weighing in at 2,500 pounds, it was 10 times as heavy as the average green anaconda, a giant that now rules titanoboa’s stomping grounds… or slithering grounds, I guess you’d say.

Titanoboa was so big, it pushed the boundaries of being able to exist on land and remain in accordance with the laws of physics. You, me, every cat and antelope and towering sauropod, we’ve all evolved under the constraints of gravity. Evolution got a bit carried away and produced the 100-foot blue whale, the biggest critter ever, only because gravity doesn’t affect giants as much in the sea.

Scientists reckon titanoboa must have also exploited this kind of simulated weightlessness. It was so outsized that “almost certainly it would have spent a large part of its time in water,” said David Polly, a vertebrate paleontologist at Indiana University. “And we know that both from the geology where it’s preserved but also by inference of how big it was. It just wouldn’t have been able to get around on land very well.”

Titanoboa sunning on a beach, totally unaware of the social-media catastrophe that would swirl around it in 60 million years.

Snakes, you see, are deceptively good swimmers, kinda like sloths. (Seriously, have you ever seen a sloth swim? They’re way faster in water than on land.) Titanoboa wouldn’t have had quite the agility of, say, a sea snake, but it didn’t need to dart around anyway. This was likely an ambush hunter, a constrictor of enormous proportions that relied not on venom, but on its incredible strength to squeeze the life out of its prey. Anacondas do the same, and indeed scientists believe titanoboa behaved much like them.

Lying in wait on shallow river and swamp bottoms, anacondas can hold their breath for up to 45 minutes, or simply rest with their noses poked out of the water. They dig themselves into the sediment–rotting leaves and such–and wait for a hapless capybara to amble through. Its strike is blindingly fast, its constriction unmerciful. Not only can the prey not breathe, its blood can’t even circulate.

Now scale that up 10 times. Large mammals such as the capybara (the world’s biggest rodent) hadn’t yet appeared on Earth, so instead titanoboa was hunting lungfish 7 feet long, plus huge turtles and crocodiles. The serpent, it seems, wasn’t the only giant of its time. And there’s a very good reason for that.

“Stay in school, kid,” says the crocodile in a somewhat muffled manner.

As you probably learned from the poor classroom garter snake you and your friends tortured as kids, reptiles need an external source of heat to power their metabolism and slither away from your tiny grabby hands. They’ll grow continuously their whole lives–reaching a plateau eventually and slowing down, sure, but they’re always expanding. And, among other things, what puts a maximum size cap on snakes is their ambient temperature.

Unfortunately for titanoboa’s prey, “the climate in the Paleocene when this animal lived was much warmer than it is today,” said Polly. “And that would have allowed for bigger reptiles, and indeed not only is there titanoboa, but even in the same site there are crocodiles and turtles that are a lot larger than any living today.”

Imagine 5 feet in length for the turtles and 20 feet for the crocs. Still, they were no match for titanoboa, an apex predator among apex predators (though the larger saucer-shaped turtles, in a sort of final statement, would have left the snakes with fairly comical bulges). And doubly unfortunate for those lower on the food chain was that across the world around this time, there were any number of snakes super-sized by warming climates, the second largest after titanoboa being gigantophis at 33 feet long.

Now, typically for endothermic–so-called “warm-blooded”–critters, the opposite trend is true. Larger body sizes, such as that of the polar bear, are better suited for frigid environments because the bigger you are, the lower your surface-area-to-volume ratio, and thus the better you retain heat. This is known as Bergmann’s rule.

Mammals have sweat glands to cool themselves if they overheat, but snakes have no such luxury. And a humongous snake smack in the middle of the tropics could find itself very toasty indeed. So how did it keep from cooking? Polly reckons that its aquatic lifestyle would have done well to regulate its body temperatures. Cool too much, and titanoboa could emerge to sunbathe. Thus these oversized reptiles could manage their temperature in the unrelenting tropical heat like finicky old folks in Florida shuffling in and out of pools.

Read more at Wired Science

The Weird, Wild World of Citizen Science Is Already Here

Up and down the west coast of North America, countless numbers of starfish are dying. The affliction, known as Sea Star Wasting Syndrome, is already being called the biggest die-off of sea stars in recorded history, and we’re still in the dark as to what’s causing it or what it means. It remains an unsolved scientific mystery. The situation is also shaping up as a case study of an unsung scientific opportunity: the rise of citizen science and exploration.

The sea star condition was first noticed by Laura James, a diver and underwater videographer based in Seattle. As they began washing up on the shore near her home with lesions and missing limbs, she became concerned and notified scientists. Similar sightings started cropping up all along the West Coast, with gruesome descriptions of sea stars that were disintegrating in a matter of days, and populations that had been decimated. As scientists race to understand what’s happening, they’ve enlisted the help of amateurs like James, to move faster. Pete Raimondi’s lab at UC Santa Cruz has created the Sea Star Wasting Map, the baseline for monitoring the issue, to capture the diverse set of contributors and collaborators.

The map is one of many new models of citizen-powered science–a blend of amateurs and professionals, looking and learning together–that are beginning to emerge. Just this week, NASA endorsed a group of amateur astronomers to attempt to rescue a vintage U.S. spacecraft. NASA doesn’t have the money to do it, and this passionate group of citizen scientists can handle it.

Unfortunately, the term “citizen science” is terrible. It’s vague enough to be confusing, yet specific enough to seem exclusive. It’s too bad, too, because the idea of citizen science is thrilling. I love the notion that I can participate in the expanding pool of human knowledge and understanding, even though the extent of my formal science education is a high school biology class. To me, it seemed a genuine invitation to be curious. A safe haven for beginners. A license to explore.

Not everyone shares my romantic perspective, though. If you ask a university researcher, they’re likely to explain citizen science as a way for the public to contribute data points to larger, professionally run studies, like participating in the galaxy-spotting website Zooniverse or taking part in the annual Christmas Bird Count with the Audubon Society. It’s a model on the scientific fringes; using broad participation to fill the gaps in necessary data.

There’s power in this diffuse definition, though, as long as new interpretations are welcomed and encouraged. By inviting and inspiring people to ask their own questions, citizen science can become much more than a way of measuring bird populations. From the drone-wielding conservationists in South Africa to the makeshift biolabs in Brooklyn, a widening circle of participants are wearing the amateur badge with honor. And all of these groups–the makers, the scientists, the hobbyists–are converging to create a new model for discovery. In other words, the maker movement and the traditional science world are on a collision course.

To understand the intersection, it helps to know where each of those groups is coming from.

MAKERS

The maker movement is an easy chart to plot. Over the past few years, it’s become increasingly clear that makers are not slowing down. They’re busy rewriting the rules of manufacturing and production. Fueled by digital fabrication tools, crowdfunding platforms, and the falling costs of sensors, microcontrollers and miniature linux computers, they’re making everything imaginable. If the market size is greater than one, it’s safe to assume that someone, somewhere will be taking on the challenge of making it. And when they take aim, the results are usually an order of magnitude drop in cost (see: drones, 3D Printers, phonesats, et al). The same research tools that used to require a hefty grant from the National Science Foundation are quickly becoming off-the-shelf parts. An exciting trend that shows no signs of slowing.

HOBBYISTS

Then there’s the analogue hobbyists: the birders, the sidewalk astronomers, the native-wildlife gardeners. Amateurs in the deepest sense of the word.  Whatever their systems lack in technical sophistication, they more than make up for in enthusiasm and coordinated participation. For example, the Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count, which started in the year 1900, annually draws thousands of contributors over the course of the month-long event, with sightings numbering in the tens of millions. That data becomes essential to ornithology research. Throw in a smartphone and invite them to identify any species, all year long, and you’ve got iNaturalist, an easy-to-use digital interface that channels the enthusiasm into foundational ecology data. That’s just one of dozens of apps that are are turning your smartphone into the connected field journal of the 21st Century.

SCIENTISTS

On the other side of the fence, scientists and researchers are looking for any advantage they can find. The federal budget sequestration was hard on everyone, especially science. And even though there was a slight easing of the expected cuts, the writing is on the wall: expect to do more with less. This doesn’t bode well for the swelling number of researchers stuck in post doc purgatory whose career prospects were already facing dismal odds.

There’s also the quiet reality that science is growing a collective blind spot in regards to public communication. Over the past 30 years, the place of science in the public discourse of America has evolved into a privileged background discussion. Many scientists know they need to bridge the various cultural divides (see: climate science, ocean science, et el.) but lack the resources, time or skills to do so. Citizen science offers a glimmer of hope. By including anyone and everyone in the process, the method becomes the message.

Read more at Wired Science

Target of Weather Conspiracy Theories Powers Down

A scientific research program based in Alaska is shutting down, much to the relief of many conspiracy theorists who believe it has been used as a global super-weapon.

According to an article in the Anchorage Daily News:

“The U.S. Air Force gave official notice to Congress Wednesday that it intends to dismantle the $300 million High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program in Gakona this summer. The shutdown of HAARP, a project created by the late Sen. Ted Stevens when he wielded great control over the U.S. defense budget, will start after a final research experiment takes place in mid-June, the Air Force said in a letter to Congress Tuesday…. Built at a cost of more than $290 million, the site has 180 antennas on 30 acres that are used to direct energy into the ionosphere, which is 55 miles to 370 miles above the Earth, and monitor changes in the flow of charged particles.”

HAARP Conspiracies

The program had become a favorite subject of conspiracy theories suggesting it had some sinister purpose. Nick Redfern, in his book “Keep Out! High Security Facilities, Underground Bases, and Other Off-Limits Areas,” asks rhetorically:

“Is such technology already being secretly utilized on a planet-wide scale, in order to instill fear in, and exert control over, the world’s population, and also exert military control and influence over areas of strategic interest? Many conspiracy theorists say yes… Those who see HAARP as having a distinctly covert agenda point to what they consider the project’s darkest of all secrets: The earthquake in Haiti.”

 Redfern suggests that the January 2010, 7.0 magnitude earthquake — which leveled much of Haiti’s urban areas and killed at least 100,000 people — “was a deliberate HAARP-induced event, designed to provide the United States government with a reason to make its presence strongly felt in an area in which it had special interests.”

In classic follow-the-money-not-the-facts conspiracy thinking, the specific special interests in this case is oil. Redfern states that “HAARP can be secretly utilized to find underground and undersea oil reserves.

How, exactly, a technology designed for studying the ionosphere — which extends high above the earth’s surface — is also used for detecting underground oil reserves or causing earthquakes is never explained.

Crass desire for oil as a reason to kill hundreds of thousands of people and devastate an already poor country might be more plausible if the United States wasn’t already one of the world’s top oil producers – getting most of the balance from Canada and South America. It would also be more likely if devastating a country’s infrastructure could somehow help instead of greatly impede the ability to access oil underneath it, and if America hadn’t donated over $1.4 billion in earthquake recovery aid.

Four and a half years later there seems to be little or no evidence of the urgent oil exploration that was presumably the whole point of the ruthless top-secret HAARP conspiracy project.

Of course it’s not just the Haiti earthquake. Conspiracy theorists suspect HAARP of causing the 2011 earthquake and the resulting tsunami that led to the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. Why would the U.S. government want cause an earthquake in, and irradiate part of, a close ally’s country? Oil, of course.

Read more at Discovery News

The Science of Misheard Song Lyrics

There is an actual official term for when you hear "excuse me while I kiss the sky" in Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" as "excuse me while I kiss this guy." Your meaningful misheard lyrics are called "mondegreens," and their study can have real psychological significance.

The Mondegreens

We've all had those awkward moments. A group of friends is singing in a car, and suddenly, someone says the wrong word. And everyone looks at each other, wondering how that person heard the wrong song lyrics, or whether they themselves are wrong.

These little misunderstandings are common, but most people don't know that there is an official title for them. It came from a popular essay by writer Sylvia Wright, where she recalled when her mother read a certain book of poems to her. One of the verses was as follows:

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,

Oh, where hae ye been?

They hae slain the Earl o' Moray,

And Lady Mondegreen.

Readers will be glad to know that Lady Mondegreen was spared the slaughter, but only because she never existed. The actual last line of the verse was, "And laid him on the green." Wright christened these misheard lyrics, which often make the poem or song better for the listener, "mondegreens." The title caught on.

Mondegreens and What They Mean

Sometimes the mondegreens make more sense than the original lyrics, but such a happy coincidence is a rare event. What's interesting is everyone has an explanation of their particular mondegreen.

I heard "I can feel it coming in the air tonight," as "I can hear it coming in the yellow night," well into my college years, and thought Phil Collins was just being poetic. A friend of mine claims both her parents, independently, heard Creedence Clearwater Revival's "There's a bad moon on the rise," as "There's a bathroom on the right."

She had to be born, grow up, listen to the song herself, and correct them before they even considered that they were wrong. When she asked them how they thought the lyrics were directions to the bathroom, her father answered, "I just figured they were stoned." Which is as good an explanation as any.

Mondegreens are often measures of experience. (This is why we all kept an eye on my brother when he heard the doo-wop song "Who Wrote the Book of Love" as "Who Let the Great Horse Die." It was probably an innocent mistake but we didn't want an amateur production of Equuson our hands.) This is why the signature phrases of most songs are misinterpreted.

The lyrics that defy cliche and break new ground are most likely to get misunderstood. "Excuse me, while I kiss this guy" might have still been outré in the 1960s when "Purple Haze" was written, but it was still more familiar than kissing the sky. We cobble together a semi-plausible lyric because we lack the experience to understand the real one. The people who are most likely to do this are the ones most lacking in experience.

Kids learn by ear, and they know that they're still learning words, so they are particularly vulnerable to mondegreens. One class of children, when asked to copy out the lyrics to "The Star-Spangled Banner," wrote, "Oh say can you see, by the donzerly light."

Children, Language Learners, and Mondegreens

Children group words together, the way they hear them, in a stream of continuous syllables. They assume the meaning of "donzerly" will come later, when they hear a few more examples of the word.

We enunciate for small babies, but as children grow, they are expected to pick up individual words, many of which they've never been exposed to, in a stream of noise. Language learners also have difficulty distinguishing one word from another, which can run them into real trouble in business or medical settings.

Read more at Discovery News

Wormhole Time Travel 'Possible' (If You're a Photon)

The idea of traversable wormholes has been science fiction fodder since Einstein first theorized their existence with the formulation of his general theory of relativity, but do wormholes even exist in nature? Actually, we have no idea if they exist or not, but if they do, theoretical physicists have proposed that they could act as portals into the future and the past or connect two distant regions of space.

But before you grab your Grays Sports Almanac and get ready for some temporal mischief, there’s one huge caveat to this idea — only photons may travel… and even photons may be too much of a stretch for the hypothetical shortcut through spacetime.

In a paper published to the arXiv preprint service (and submitted to the journal Physical Review D), theoretical physicist Luke Butcher of the University of Cambridge has revisited wormhole theory and potentially found a way to bridge these notoriously unstable entities.

In the late 1980s, physicist Kip Thorne, of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), theorized that to make a wormhole ‘traversable’ — as in to actually make these spacetime shortcuts stable enough to travel through — some form of negative energy would be required. In the quantum world, this negative energy could come in the form of Casimir energy.

It is well known that if two perfectly smooth plates are held very close together in a vacuum, quantum effects between the plates will have a net repulsive (or attractive, depending on the plate configuration) effect between the two. This is caused by waves of energy being too large to fit between the plates, causing a net negative energy between the plates when compared with the surrounding “normal” space.

As realized by Thorne and his Caltech team, this Casimir energy could be applied to the neck of a wormhole, potentially holding it open long enough for something to pass through.

Alas, we are talking about quantum-sized wormhole throats, meaning Marty McFly’s speeding DeLorean will be left revving in the 1985 parking lot, unable to squeeze through. But even if some quantum-sized traveler could pass through the wormhole’s neck, the wormhole would still likely collapse very quickly.

On reevaluating this scenario, Butcher has identified some more stable wormhole configurations and, in certain situations, the wormhole collapse could be prevented for an “arbitrarily long time.” But for this to happen, the wormhole needs to be very long and have a very narrow throat. In this case it seems possible that photons could traverse the wormhole.

“(T)he negative Casimir energy does allow the wormhole to collapse extremely slowly, its lifetime growing without bound as the throat-length is increased,” writes Butcher. “We find that the throat closes slowly enough that its central region can be safely traversed by a pulse of light.”

Butcher admits that although it’s not clear from his calculations whether the light pulse will be able to complete its journey from one end to the other, there is a tantalizing possibility for sending signals faster than the speed of light or even back in time.

Read more at Discovery News