Duck Walk

CSI

 

A Coronal Mass Ejection From the Sun

Telegraph networks all throughout the globe failed catastrophically on September 1 and 2, 1859. The telegraph operators reported feeling electrical shocks, telegraph paper catching fire, and being able to operate equipment without batteries. The aurora borealis, sometimes known as the northern lights, could be seen as far south as Colombia in the evenings. This phenomenon is typically only seen at higher latitudes, such as in northern Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia.

The planet was hit by a tremendous geomagnetic storm on that day, which is now known as the Carrington Event. When a massive bubble of superheated gas called plasma is blasted from the sun’s surface and collides with the Earth, it causes these storms. This bubble is called a coronal mass ejection.

The plasma of a coronal mass ejection consists of a cloud of protons and electrons, which are electrically charged particles. When these particles reach the Earth, they interact with the magnetic field that surrounds the planet. This interaction causes the magnetic field to distort and weaken, which in turn leads to the strange behavior of the aurora borealis and other natural phenomena. As an electrical engineer who specializes in the power grid, I study how geomagnetic storms also threaten to cause power and internet outages and how to protect against that.
Geomagnetic storms

The Carrington Event of 1859 is the largest recorded account of a geomagnetic storm, but it is not an isolated event.

Geomagnetic storms have been recorded since the early 19th century, and scientific data from Antarctic ice core samples has shown evidence of an even more massive geomagnetic storm that occurred around A.D. 774, now known as the Miyake Event. That solar flare produced the largest and fastest rise in carbon-14 ever recorded. Geomagnetic storms trigger high amounts of cosmic rays in Earth’s upper atmosphere, which in turn produce carbon-14, a radioactive isotope of carbon.  READ MORE...

Curious Cat

 

Sleeping Through the Night

What's worse: Struggling to fall asleep in the first place or instantly falling asleep when your head meets the pillow only to wake up in the middle of the night? Neither scenario is ideal, but lying awake in the dead of night, counting down the minutes until you actually have to get up for the day, is a grueling feeling.

Fortunately, there are plenty of expert-backed ways to sleep through the entire night without waking up.

Reasons you might wake up in the middle of the night.

According to sleep expert Jacob Teitelbaum, M.D., waking up in the middle of the night isn't uncommon. In fact, according to a study published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, 35.5% of 8,937 participants surveyed reported middle-of-the-night awakenings at least three times per week, while 23% reported waking up at least one time per night.

Wake-ups generally take place during light sleep, or the second of the four phases of sleep when the body's core temperature starts to rise, explains sleep expert Michael J. Breus, Ph.D. Unlike in deeper sleep stages like REM sleep, the brain can easily be awakened during light sleep.

But what causes these middle-of-the-night awakenings? "Sometimes simply going through a stressful time can cause people to wake in the middle of the night," says Teitelbaum. He adds that another common reason people wake up in the middle of the night is their body is experiencing an adrenaline rush triggered by something like low blood sugar or a hormonal flux.

In order to put a stop to your late-night stirring, the first step is to identify why it's happening in the first place. If there's an obvious answer—i.e. you're feeling stressed or you're dealing with a stuffy nose—great. If not, something is, most likely, going on either subconsciously or physiologically, so you'll have to dig a little deeper to get to the root of the issue.

If you find yourself waking up in the middle of the night consistently for more than two months, it's important to talk to a physician for professional help and guidance.  READ MORE...

Bioluminesence

 

Personality Traits & Cognitive Impairment

Having specific personality traits might be connected to our risk of developing cognitive problems later on in life, new research suggests – and that in turn might point to better ways of treating issues like dementia.

A total of 1,954 volunteers without a formal diagnosis of dementia took part in the study, filling out personality questionnaires that were cross-checked against their health records and any cognitive problems as they got older. Curiously enough, organized and self-disciplined people appeared less likely to develop mild cognitive impairment, whereas neurotic people were more prone to it.

As this was a correlational study, it's not clear if there are fundamental aspects of biology underpinning the link, but the researchers have their suspicions.

"Personality traits reflect relatively enduring patterns of thinking and behaving, which may cumulatively affect engagement in healthy and unhealthy behaviors and thought patterns across the lifespan," says psychologist Tomiko Yoneda, from the University of Victoria in Canada.

"The accumulation of lifelong experiences may then contribute to susceptibility of particular diseases or disorders, such as mild cognitive impairment, or contribute to individual differences in the ability to withstand age-related neurological changes."

Personality traits are usually divided into the so-called 'Big Five', which are agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and extraversion. This particular study examined the last three.

Conscientiousness covers traits including being responsible, being well organized, working hard, and being goal-oriented. Those who scored highly for conscientiousness on a scale of 0–48 were less likely to develop impairments – a 6 point increase on the scale was associated with a 22 percent lower risk.  READ MORE...

Roll Over

Happy

Weirdness of Quantum Mechanics

Quantum mechanics has a way of taking your mind to places it just doesn’t want to go. Famously hard to understand and impossible to intuit, concepts such as quantum entanglement and superposition really make sense only when viewed through a mathematical lens. Plain language most often leads you down dead ends or false paths that end miles away from reality, with carelessly chosen words propagating misunderstandings at the speed of the internet.

A well-known case in point comes from Albert Einstein. The baked-in weirdness of quantum mechanics troubled him, leading to two celebrated quotes. One— “God does not play dice with the universe”—expressed his unease about the reign of probability over certainty in the quantum realm.

In the other quote, Einstein challenged the notion of the probabilistic correlations among particles, known as quantum entanglement, saying, “I cannot seriously believe in it because the theory cannot be reconciled with the idea that physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.”

That last phrase has launched a thousand misguided speculations about faster-than-light communications. The main problem lies in the word action. It leans toward cause and effect—something directly affecting something else—and implies an unknown mechanism instantaneously operating on widely separated particles. 

That influence would clearly violate both the locality principle in physics (objects are only influenced by what’s nearby) and Einstein’s own Special Theory of Relativity, which set the universal speed limit at the speed of light, a theory backed up by observational evidence for a hundred years.

Entanglement refers to the condition of a system composed of atomic-scale particles whose states cannot be fully described independently or individually. John Preskill of Caltech described the situation with a literary metaphor. Someone who read 10 pages of a 100-page book composed in the classical, or non-quantum, physics world, would learn 10% of the book. 

Reading 10 pages of a quantum book would reveal almost nothing about the book’s contents. As Preskill says, “nearly all the information in the book is encoded in the correlations among the pages.” This principle of quantum mechanics has practical application as the basis for the power of quantum computing and other technologies because you can store information globally within the quantum system.  READ MORE...

Miles Davis

 

Wonders of the World

Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Iraq

The seven wonders of the ancient world were a selection of exceptional pieces of architecture and art in the Middle East, North Africa and southern Europe.

A number of ancient and medieval writers from Europe and Middle East debated and described what are today called the seven "wonders" of the world (not all writers used the term "wonder" to describe them). The ancient Greek writer Herodotus, who lived from 484 to 425 B.C., was one of the earliest writers to discuss them, and while his writings on the wonders did not survive, they were referenced in later texts.

The wonders that should be included in the list were debated over millennia, with different authors proposing different sites. The list that we have today "only became fixed in the Renaissance," archaeologists Peter Clayton and Martin Price wrote in the book "The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World" (Routledge, 1988).

The Great Pyramid at Giza is both the oldest ancient wonder on the list and the only one still standing today. It was built as a mausoleum for the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Khufu nearly 4,600 years ago and was the world's tallest structure until Lincoln Cathedral's central tower was completed in England in 1311.

The Great Pyramid was 481 feet (147 meters) tall when it was first completed, but today, due to the loss of some of its stones, it stands 455 feet (139 m) high. The interior of the pyramid contains a system of passageways leading to a "grand gallery" that travels up towards a room with an empty sarcophagus — often called the "king's chamber."

Additionally, the passageways in the Great Pyramid lead to two other chambers including what is sometimes called the "queen's chamber" (although it likely did not hold a queen) and a subterranean chamber located beneath the pyramid. The purpose of these two chambers is a matter of debate. In 2017 scientists scanning the pyramid also detected a large void above the grand gallery that could contain one or more chambers.  TO READ ABOUT THESE OTHER WONDERS OF THE WORLD, CLICK HERE...

High Seas

 

Fusion Reaction Energy

Magnetic fusion reactors contain super hot plasma in a donut-shaped container called a tokamak.

Nuclear fusion hit a milestone thanks to better reactor walls – this engineering advance is building toward reactors of the future.

Scientists in England have set a new record for the quantity of energy generated during a controlled, sustained fusion reaction. The creation of 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds at the Joint European Torus – or JET – experiment in England has been dubbed a “breakthrough” by certain media organizations and has sparked physicists’ interest. However, a frequent saying about fusion energy generation is that it is “always 20 years away.”

We are a nuclear physicist and a nuclear engineer working to develop controlled nuclear fusion for power generation.

The JET finding represents significant progress in the understanding of fusion physics. But, perhaps more crucially, it demonstrates that the new materials used to create the fusion reactor’s inner walls performed as expected. The fact that the new wall structure functioned so well sets these findings apart from past milestones and brings magnetic fusion closer to reality.

Fusing particles together
Nuclear fusion is the merging of two atomic nuclei into one compound nucleus. This nucleus then breaks apart and releases energy in the form of new atoms and particles that speed away from the reaction. A fusion power plant would capture the escaping particles and use their energy to generate electricity.

There are a few different ways to safely control fusion on Earth. Our research focuses on the approach taken by JET – using powerful magnetic fields to confine atoms until they are heated to a high enough temperature for them to fuse.

The fuel for current and future reactors are two different isotopes of hydrogen – meaning they have the one proton, but different numbers of neutrons – called deuterium and tritium. Normal hydrogen has one proton and no neutrons in its nucleus. Deuterium has one proton and one neutron while tritium has one proton and two neutrons.  READ MORE...

Bird Dance

All At Once

 

How Civilization Started

The dawn of human civilization is often pinned down to the rise of farming. As food production grew, so did human populations, trade, and tax.

Or so the prevailing story goes.

Economists have now put forward a competing hypothesis, and it suggests a surplus of food on its own was not enough to drive the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to the hierarchical states that eventually led to civilization as we know it.

Instead, multiple data sets covering several thousand years show this reigning theory is empirically flawed.

Even when some parts of the world adopted farming and began producing a surplus of food, it did not necessarily lead to complex hierarchies or tax-levied states.

Only when humans began farming food that could be stored, divvied up, traded, and taxed, did social structures begin to take shape.

That's probably why cereal grains like wheat, barley, and rice – rather than taro, yams, or potatoes – are at the root of virtually all classical civilizations. If the land was capable of cultivating grains, evidence shows it was much more likely to host complex societal structures.

"The relative ease of confiscating stored cereals, their high energy density, and their durability enhances their appropriability, thereby facilitating the emergence of tax-levying elites," the authors of the hypothesis write.

"Roots and tubers, in contrast, are typically perennial and do not have to be reaped in a particular period, but once harvested are rather perishable."

In parts of South America, for instance, perennial root crops like cassava can be harvested all year round. Unfortunately, however, cassava rots easily and is difficult to transport.  READ MORE...

Flying High

 

Ancient Persia

From around 550 BCE to the age of Alexander the Great in the 330s BCE, each successive generation of Greeks had its own particular way of reconfirming, as needed, Hellenic identity against the ever-changing yet ever-present Persian threat. The Greek obsession with the Persians focused on minimizing their credibility as a superpower. 

Denigration of the Persians—by vilification or lampooning—was intended to cauterize the wounds of anguish and fear provoked by the threats and realities of being neighbors of an empire whose territorial ambitions were very real and which showed no sign of ever abating.

In order to increase Greek morale, a series of what might be termed “cathartic” images were created on stage, in sculpture, and in the other arts. These disparaged, degraded, and belittled the Persians and confirmed Greek (especially Athenian) pre-eminence.

One such object is a red-figured wine-jug dated to the mid-460s BCE. Known as the “Eurymedon Vase,” it shows a humiliated Persian soldier bending forward from the waist. His backside is offered up to a grubby Athenian squaddie who stands with his erect penis in his hand, rushing forward in order to penetrate the Persian’s rear. 

The painted rape scene (for that’s what it is) was created as a “commemorative issue” at the time the Athenians celebrated a victory over Persian forces at the battle of the River Eurymedon in Asia Minor in 467 BCE. It was used at some kind of drinking party, probably a soldiers’ get-together. As the jug was passed around a group of hoplites—the Greek equivalent of GIs—so the wine flowed and the dirty jokes began to fly. So too was the Persian on the vase manhandled from soldier to soldier.

As each drinker gripped the jug, he replayed the drama of the scene: “Now I am Eurymedon,” he boasted. “Look at me, buggering this Persian!” The vase image is a perceptive visualization of soldiers’ humor, although it is highly likely that the scene reflected a lived reality. 

After all, the post-battle rape of defeated soldiers has never been just a drinking-game fantasy. The Eurymedon vase was an expression of the Athenian zeitgeist of the 460s BCE. It was a well-aimed joke on recent unexpected but fortuitous political and military events which demonstrated the natural superiority of the Greeks over the barbarian Persians.  READ MORE...

Slow Walker