The Last Word On Nothing | "Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing" - Victor Hugo

Guest Post: Why humans suck at earthquake preparedness

By: Jane C. Hu | November 19, 2015

Driving through my hometown in Kentucky, I admire the old-growth oaks, the spires and stained glass of Victorian era homes, and the tall brick chimneys. Then I think about how they would crumble in an earthquake. Ever since moving to the west coast, I size up the earthquake safety of every place I go: I note every building’s exits; I avoid waiting on or under overpasses; I plan which way I’d run if a big tree falls. But growing up in the Ohio Valley, I never, ever thought about earthquakes.

I probably should have, though. Kentucky falls within both the New Madrid seismic zone (NMSZ) and the Wabash Valley seismic zone (WVSZ), fault systems that have a history of producing catastrophic earthquakes. The NMSZ, for instance, was responsible for a series of earthquakes in 1811-1812 so large that it disrupted the flow of the Mississippi river, creating a meander that cut off the southwestern edge of Kentucky from the rest of the state. Yet the region remains blissfully unaware of and unprepared for the next “big one,” which the USGS says has a 7-10% chance of happening in the next 50 years. A 2009 report funded by FEMA estimated that a quake that size could result in 86,000 casualties and over $300 billion in damage. The chances of a smaller but still-significant quake (a 6.0) are even higher – USGS says there’s a 25-40% chance of that in the next 50 years.

Given this risk, it seems mindboggling to me that my hometown is not more prepared. But it seems like this is a very human problem: we have a hard time responding to slow-moving threats. Despite the years-long drought, rich Californians still have water coming out of their pipes, so why not water the polo fields? And who cares about climate change when you’ll be dead by the time the last glacier melts? The tale many evolutionary psychologists tell is that we are made for immediate gratification. Planning for an earthquake – something that may or may not happen, and that may or may not be deadly – gets deprioritized in favor of more pressing issues, like deadlines and dinner. Continue reading →

“The Martian” and Ice Age Astronauts

By: Craig Childs | November 18, 2015

Two nights ago I sat in a theater watching the film “The Martian.” I loved seeing a viable spacecraft making gravitational slingshots around planets while a stranded, potato-growing astronaut claimed himself the first colonist on Mars.

What’s there not to love?

Meanwhile, in my coat pocket I carried an object from an entirely different age of colonization.

I had just spent three days with flint knapper Greg Nunn in Utah. I had commissioned Nunn to make a replica of a Clovis-era spear point, a megafauna hunting tool from the American Paleolithic. I had put the rocket-shaped artifact — the length of my hand from wrist to fingertip — in my pocket and forgot it was there until I walked out of the theater. Reaching in, I found the sharp-edged stone and pulled it out.

Like everything I had just watched, the Clovis point was the height of technology for its time. It was a tool being carried into an unknown land 13,000 years ago. As thin as a letter envelope and long enough to glide into the heart or lungs of a mammoth or Pleistocene bison, the Clovis point was a tool of colonization. It was a landing module on Mars. Continue reading →

Taking the Waste out of Wastewater

By: Helen Fields | November 17, 2015

In a fenced-off corner of Washington, D.C, down at the very tip, where the city’s diamond shape meets the Potomac river, is a giant feeding station for gulls.

Ok, that’s not its main function. If you have ever pooped in DC, or in parts of four surrounding counties, including Dulles International Airport, you have helped support the birds at the Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant. It’s run by DC Water, an agency that loads visitors like me into a tour van that says “DRINK TAP” on the side. For historic reasons, D.C.’s drinking water is actually treated by the Army Corps of Engineers, not DC Water. But DC Water handles pretty much everything else about it, including what happens to it after it’s been used.

“Used water” is the term preferred by engineer Bill Brower, the program manager for DC Water’s Biosolids Program and the leader of a tour of Blue Plains arranged on Sunday for a local science writing organization. “Enriched water” is another amusing euphemism. You see, “waste water” makes it sound like trash, Brower says, when actually they can get a lot out of the stuff from our toilets. (And, the system being how it is, from our sinks, dishwashers, washing machines, and, in the old parts of town, even the water that runs off the streets.) Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Return of Persian Science

By: Ramin Skibba | November 16, 2015

Like many multiethnic and multicultural people, I’ve had difficulty coming to terms with my multifaceted yet fragmented identity. As a half-Iranian in the midst of Americans, I’ve lacked key cultural influences and a US-centric worldview, while in Iran I feel like an outsider at times.

I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to visit twice so far—once as a teenager and once more recently as a physicist. Each time, I’ve been very observant in the hopes of better understanding an important side of myself. I’ve explored its fascinatingly unique cities, including the massive capital, Tehran, and its huge bazaars; Esfahan, with its spectacular architecture and Jahan Square, a national landmark; and Shiraz, with its tombs of poet giants, Hafez and Saadi. I’ve also looked for signs of how the country appears to be changing as it becomes more open to the international community.

At the invitation of Sohrab Rahvar, physics professor at the University of Sharif, I gave two seminars, one there and another at the University of Tehran. I presented postdoctoral research I was doing at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, investigating connections between observations of galaxies and theories of dark matter.

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Jennifer S. Holland | November 14, 2015

November 9-13

This week, guest poster Soren Wheeler shares why the chaos and failure inherent in science should be embraced in science education.

In a dispatch from China, I offer a glimpse into the fieldwork that, despite the roaches, makes my heart go pitter-pat.

Craig Childs exposes a secret of the cracked and desolate Atacama Desert: It comes, gloriously, to life.

During this week of Veteran’s Day, Michelle Nijhuis asks us to remember another kind of soldier, the environmental activist serving, and often dying, to protect the wild.

And Rose Eveleth considers whether the Internet is like the lead plumbing of ancient Rome, a tremendously useful tool that betters lives while slowly poisoning its users.

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Photo: Martha Zabalete/teleSUR (“http://www.telesurtv.net/english/multimedia/Flowers-Bloom-in-Chiles-Atacama-Desert-20151102-0017.html”)

The Internet Is a Series of Lead Tubes

By: Rose Eveleth | November 13, 2015

Like many of you, I suspect, I have a love hate relationship with the internet. I love the access it gives me to all sorts of information, and how it connects me with people I would have never been able to hear from before. I hate how it also contains spaces for people to easily gather to abuse and harass people. I have made great, deep friends on the internet, and I have also wanted to burn the whole thing down.

A few months ago I talked to Finn Brunton, a digital historian at NYU, for an episode of my podcast Meanwhile in the Future. The episode was all about why we might, voluntarily and collectively, decide to abandon the internet. It’s a fun one, and you should listen if that kind of weird future speculation intrigues you. But Brunton also said something that didn’t make it into the podcast, but that I think about a lot now. It was an analogy for the internet, and how future us might think about our current internet world. Maybe, he said, the internet is like lead pipes in Rome.

Continue reading →

Lives on the Line

By: Michelle Nijhuis | November 12, 2015

Last Saturday, in the Preah Vihear forest reserve in northern Cambodia, forest ranger Sieng Darong and police officer Sab Yoh confiscated some chainsaws from an illegal logging site. For them, it was routine work. Both had patrolled Cambodian forests for years, and were familiar with the country’s epidemic of illegal logging and wildlife poaching.

That night, they set up camp with two colleagues, planning to continue their patrol the following day. While they slept, an intruder armed with a high-powered weapon killed them both. Darong, 47, was survived by his wife and two daughters; Yoh, 28, is survived by his wife and daughter. One of their colleagues escaped, and the other is wounded but recovering.

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Life on Another Planet, The Atacama in Bloom

By: Craig Childs | November 11, 2015

Rain has been falling on the driest non-polar desert in the world, famous for parts of it not seeing a drop of rain for centuries. The Atacama Desert in South America is caught in the rain shadow of the Andes on one side, and cold dry air washing in from an Antarctica ocean current on the other. This year, el Niño is on. Warmer waters are pushing against the West Coast of South America allowing rain to come to a rainless place. Last March, seven years of rain in a place that averages less than 4 millimeters a year fell overnight. The result has been an explosion of wildflowers, their seeds waiting in the hard dry soils for this very moment.

In August even more rain fell and a second even wilder bloom followed. A barren country where you can walk for days without seeing an ant, a fly, or a blade of grass erupted in a gloriously obscene display of flora.

I know the place in its other state: death. I went there for the desolation. I was writing about projections billions of years in the future when the sun begins to expand in one of its final acts. Naked under this searing light, oceans would boil away. The surface of the Atacama is all that remained, a barren floor of salt pillars lifeless pans. It was my end of the world. Continue reading →