New York City could be in for a big shake-up someday. A new study discovered that several small faults thought to be inactive are, well, merely resting:

Many faults and a few mostly modest quakes have long been known around New York City, but the research casts them in a new light. The scientists say the insight comes from sophisticated analysis of past quakes, plus 34 years of new data on tremors, most of them perceptible only by modern seismic instruments. The evidence charts unseen but potentially powerful structures whose layout and dynamics are only now coming clearer, say the scientists. [snip] The researchers found concrete evidence for one significant previously unknown structure: an active seismic zone running at least 25 miles from Stamford, Conn., to the Hudson Valley town of Peekskill, N.Y., where it passes less than a mile north of the Indian Point nuclear power plant. The Stamford-Peekskill line stands out sharply on the researchers’ earthquake map, with small events clustered along its length, and to its immediate southwest.

Unless you’re a fan of disaster flicks, “New York City” and “earthquake” probably don’t occur to you in the same sentence frequently. But the Earth is full o’ faults. They pop up in rather surprising places, like the center of the United States, and do astonishing things, like make the Mississippi River flow backwards for a time. Seriously, it happened.

When we think of earthquakes, I think most of us think of the devastation. We don’t really think so much about what earthquakes are telling us about how our world works. And we don’t think about their landscaping skills. They’re really fascinating things, especially if you don’t have to worry much about being hit by one.

Let’s have a look at where that’s likely to be.

If you know anything about plate tectonics, you’re noticing a pattern about now: earthquakes mark out the boundaries of the plates pretty well. And the types of earthquakes tell us a lot about the type of boundary we’re seeing. For instance, shallow-depth, low-intensity earthquakes occur at mid-ocean ridges, while areas demonstrating a continuum of shallow, intermediate or deep quakes – a Wadati-Benioff zone – shows us we’ve got a subduction zone.

Earthquakes have taught us things as diverse as what the interior of the world might look like and whether some absolute bastard’s exploded a nuclear bomb on the sly. That’s because you can learn a lot from a seismic wave. Different types of waves travel differently depending on what caused them and what they’re traveling through:
Seismic Waves

The mechanical properties of the rocks that seismic waves travel through quickly organize the waves into two types. Compressional waves, also known as primary or P waves, travel fastest, at speeds between 1.5 and 8 kilometers per second in the Earth’s crust. Shear waves, also known as secondary or S waves, travel more slowly, usually at 60% to 70% of the speed of P waves.

P waves shake the ground in the direction they are propagating, while S waves shake perpendicularly or transverse to the direction of propagation.

 

All of this is fascinating and informative stuff, but it may not have a personal meaning for you. Unless you live in volcano country, that is. If that’s the case, harmonic tremors become your dearest friends. Harmonic tremors alert scientists to the movement of magma beneath a volcano, and a swarm of them lets you know that it’s maybe kinda sorta time to run like hell.

This is good information to have when you live next to a volcano.

Earthquakes don’t just destroy and warn: they sculpt. Some pretty amazing landscapes have been created by them.

On our left, we have a canyon in Jordan created by water eroding an earthquake fissure.

And to our right, an earthquake fissure in California that, with enough time and running water, could become a rather spectacular gorge.

Here’s Earthquake Lake in Montana, created one day in 1959 when an earthquake triggered a landslide that formed a natural dam. Bet you the beavers were jealous.

I hope this whirlwind tour of earthquakes has given you at least some sense that they do far more than just make things shake and knock cities down. They’re pretty fantastic things, quite useful, and even wonderful. As long as you don’t have to meet one in person… good luck on that, New York.

Don’t laugh. I’m about to admit that the movie The Saint captured my imagination. Look, I know it was total cheese, and I know that cold fusion is controversial and quite possibly bunkum, but that line of Elisabeth Shue’s has haunted me for years: her scientist character asks us to imagine driving our cars a million miles on a gallon of seawater. I’ve imagined it ever since.

Well, we’re one step closer to that day. But it won’t be cold fusion that gets us there. It’s cobalt, fuel cells, and some very determined scientists at MIT.

We’ve been able to split water into its component hydrogen and oxygen molecules for centuries, but as far as an energy source, it’s been virtually useless. It takes energy to break things up. Clean, cheap fuel isn’t going to happen when you have to use hydrocarbons to create hydrogen fuel, or when the materials that help the process along cost thousands of dollars per ounce.

So Daniel Nocera, head of MIT’s Solar Revolution Project, decided to take a cue from nature. Plants manage to split water into hydrogen and oxygen quite efficiently, using just the power of the sun. What if we could find man-made materials that could do the same thing? Nocera and his team asked.

We could end up holding the key to clean energy in our hands.

They started playing with the periodic chart. They started mixing chemicals. And then:

“We [have] figured out a way just using a glass of water at room temperature, under atmospheric pressure,” Nocera says. “This thing [a thin film of cobalt and phosphate on an electrode] just churns away making [oxygen] from water.”

Think about this for a moment. No exotic metals as catalysts. No special temperatures or pressures necessary. Just a simple little setup that could run on a beam of sunlight, giving us a fuel that could power our planet cleanly.

The possibilities are intriguing.
.

Since it is quite explosive, carrying huge tanks of hydrogen in your car would be dangerous. In theory, it would be possible to bring a jug of water instead and produce little bits of the gas on demand.

But let’s not get hung up on cars. It’s not just cars, but houses: should this become an economically viable technology, it would solve the problem of powering your home on a cloudy day. You’ll have plenty of hydrogen stored up, to use as needed.

And what about consumer electronics? Did you ever expect your cell phone and computer could run on water? There’s a good chance they someday will:

The days of fast-fading cellular phone batteries may soon be over. Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL

) recently developed a working prototype for a portable fuel cell energy source that could power a cellular phone 300 percent longer than existing rechargeable batteries do. Indeed, the new technology would be less expensive, smaller and more powerful than any battery currently in use, according to Jeff Morse of LLNL’s Center for Microtechnology Engineering. He predicts that it could replace standard lithium-ion and lithium-ion polymer batteries in a number of consumer electronics products, such as laptops and handheld computers.

The new power source, which runs on liquid fuels, has at its core a thin layer of electrolyte materials sandwiched between electrode materials. As control elements distribute the fuel over one electrode surface, the other receives air. Heating of the electrolyte-electrode layers stimulates the flow of protons from the fuel, sending them across the electrolyte layer to the air-breathing electrode. The protons then react with oxygen to generate electrical current. Conveniently, recharging the power source requires only a simple switch of fuel cartridges.

And where would this liquid fuel come from? You guessed it: your little electrolyzer gizmo made cheap and simple by Daniel Nocera et al.

We’re closer to a future where energy is cheap, abundant, and non-polluting. The science of energy will get us there, one inspiration at a time.

Tip o’ the shot glass to the Wired Science blog, which provided the inspiration for this Sunday’s science. As always, click on the photos for their sources and fun, (usually) relevant additional material.

Great Moments in DNA

Nothing proves that size doesn’t matter like DNA. That tiny little molecule nested deep within our cells proves useful in an incredible variety of ways. It’s the architect of life, coding for proteins that create everything from bacteria to great blue whales. With it, we can trace the origin and unfolding of life over billions of years. It exonerates the innocent and convicts the guilty. It opens up vast new possibilities in medicine, allowing us the hope of curing the previously incurable. It could lead to unbelievably powerful new computers. And it provides a nifty scaffold for nanotechnology, which will revolutionize the gadgets that improve our lives.

We’ve come a long way from Gregor Mendel and his peas. Join me in a journey through some of DNA’s greatest moments, and let’s raise a glass to the stuff of life.

1869 – DNA first isolated

In the winter of 1868/9 the young Swiss doctor Friedrich Miescher, working in the laboratory of Felix Hoppe-Seyler at the University of Tübingen, performed experiments on the chemical composition of leukocytes that lead to the discovery of DNA. In his experiments, Miescher noticed a precipitate of an unknown substance, which he characterised further. Its properties during the isolation procedure and its resistance to protease digestion indicated that the novel substance was not a protein or lipid. Analyses of its elementary composition revealed that, unlike proteins, it contained large amounts of phosphorous and, as Miescher confirmed later, lacked sulphur. Miescher recognised that he had discovered a novel molecule. Since he had isolated it from the cells’ nuclei he named it nuclein, a name preserved in today’s designation deoxyribonucleic acid.

1952 – A blender and a centrifuge prove DNA the stuff of genetics

The Hershey-Chase experiments were a series of experiments conducted in 1952 by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase, confirming that DNA was the genetic material, which had first been demonstrated by Oswald Avery in 1944. While DNA had been well known to biologists since 1869, most assumed at the time that proteins carried the information for inheritance. Hershey and Chase conducted their experiments on the T2 phage, a virus whose structure had recently been shown by electron microscopy. The phage consists only of a protein shell containing its genetic material. The phage infects a bacterium by attaching to its outer membrane and injecting its genetic material, causing the bacterium’s genetic machinery to produce more viruses, leaving its empty shell attached to the bacterium. [snip]

In a second experiment, they labelled the phages with radioactive Sulfur-35 (Sulfur is present in the amino acids Cysteine and Methionine, but not in DNA). After separation, the radioactive tracer then was found in the protein shells, but not in the infected bacteria, confirming that the genetic material which infects the bacteria is DNA.

1953 – Photo 51 leads to discovery of the double helix

Research undertaken by Maurice Wilkins, with support from Rosalind Franklin, led to the discovery of the DNA molecule structure. This discovery, by American geneticist James Watson and British biophysicist Francis Crick in 1953, revolutionised biology and medicine. [snip] Crick and Watson’s announcement of a structure for DNA and how it is made of nucleic acid suggested how it might replicate, mutate, and be expressed. They proposed that the DNA molecule takes the shape of a double helix, an elegantly simple structure that resembles a gently-twisted ladder. The rails of the ladder are made of alternating units of phosphate and the sugar deoxyribose; the rungs are each composed of a pair of nitrogen-containing nucleotides.

1966 – Biochemical analysis breaks the genetic code

In 1966 the genetic code was finally “cracked”. Marshall Nirenberg, Heinrich Mathaei and Severo Ochoa demonstrated that a sequence of three nucleotide bases, a codon, determines each of the 20 amino acids. This means that there are 64 combinations possible for 20 amino acids. The formed synthetic mRNA by mixing the nucleotides of RNA with a special enzyme called polynucleotide phosphorylase. This resulted in the formation of a single-stranded RNA in this reaction. The question was how this genetic code, built up out of four different nucleotides, could code for the twenty different amino acids, which were found in nature. Nirenberg and Matthaei synthesized poly(U) by reacting only uracil nucleotides with the RNA synthesizing enzyme, producing -UUUU-. They mixed this poly(U) with the protein synthesizing machinery of E. Coli in vitro and observed the formation of a protein. This protein turned out to be a polypeptide of phenylalanine. So, they showed a triplet of uracil must code for phenylalanine.

1970 – First restriction enzyme isolated

In a series of landmark papers, beginning in 1970, Hamilton Smith, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, outlined the results of work with Haemophilus influenzae Rd and phage P22, which naturally infects Salmonella bacteria. In 1972, he purified the first site-specific “Type II” restriction enzyme, known as Hind II. The crucial discovery came by chance: Incubating bacteria and phage together, Smith happened to notice that the phage DNA degraded over time. He and his colleagues were successful in purifying the enzyme at work, and went on to identify the short sequence of 6 base pairs in phage P22 that Hind II recognized and cut apart—always at the same location, in exactly the same way.

1983 – Polymerase Chain Reaction kicks sample size to the curb

At the time he developed PCR in 1983, Mullis was working in Emeryville, California for Cetus Corporation, one of the first biotechnology companies. There, he was responsible for synthesizing short chains of DNA. Mullis has written that he conceived of PCR while cruising along the Pacific Coast Highway one night in his car.[38] He was playing in his mind with a new way of analyzing changes (mutations) in DNA when he realized that he had instead invented a method of amplifying any DNA region through repeated cycles of duplication driven by DNA polymerase. In Scientific American, Mullis summarized the procedure: “Beginning with a single molecule of the genetic material DNA, the PCR can generate 100 billion similar molecules in an afternoon. The reaction is easy to execute. It requires no more than a test tube, a few simple reagents, and a source of heat.”[39] He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993 for his invention,[4] seven years after he and his colleagues at Cetus first put his proposal to practice.

1984 – DNA becomes a powerful foresnics tool

DNA fingerprinting has become an indelible part of society, helping to prove innocence or guilt in criminal cases, resolving immigration arguments and clarifying paternity. Its inventor, Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, University of Leicester, looks back at how it began. [snip] “The true story of DNA fingerprinting starts at the headquarters of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge,” says Professor Jeffreys. “I collected a big lump of seal meat from their lock-up freezer and, to cut a long story short, we got the seal myoglobin gene, had a look at human myoglobin gene and there, inside an intron in that gene was tandem repeat DNA – a minisatellite.”

1987 – Mitochondrial DNA draws human family tree

Scanning broadly has produced global migratory maps of unprecedented resolution, some of which have been published only during recent months. The research provides an endorsement of modern human origins in Africa and shows how that continent served as a reservoir of genetic diversity that trickled out to the rest of the world. A genetic family tree that begins with the San people of Africa at its root ends with South American Indians and Pacific Islanders on its youngest-growing branches. [snip] …Rebecca L. Cann and Allan C. Wilson of the University of California, Berkeley, published a groundbreaking paper based on analyzing the DNA of mitochondria, the cell’s energy-producing organelles, which are passed down through the maternal line. They reported that humans from different populations all descended from a single female in Africa who lived about 200,000 years ago—a finding that immediately made headlines trumpeting the discovery of the “Mitochondrial Eve.”

1988 – Colin Pitchfork becomes first murderer convicted by DNA evidence; DNA frees its first wrongfully-convicted man

Colin Pitchfork (born 1961, Bristol, England) was the first criminal convicted for murder based on DNA fingerprinting evidence and the first to be caught as a result of mass screening. Pitchfork raped and murdered two girls in Narborough, Leicestershire, on November 21, 1983, and on July 31, 1986. He was arrested on September 19, 1987, and sentenced to life imprisonment on January 23, 1988 after admitting both murders.

[Timothy] Spencer was arrested by Arlington police and charged with the murder of Susan Tucker, his most recent victim. DNA evidence later connected him to the murders of Davis and Hellams[1]. He was also convicted in the Cho murder though DNA evidence wasn’t used at trial. DNA evidence also tied him to the 1984 murder of Carol Hamm, a crime which David Vasquez had been convicted of. Vasquez was eventually acquitted after having served five years of a thirty-five year prison sentence and was the first American to be exonerated based on DNA evidence.

(Photo credit: Lee Lofland at The Graveyard Shift)

1990 – 2003 Human Genome Project

The publication of the detailed structure of 99 percent of the human genome on April 14 is the culmination of one of the largest scientific undertakings in history. Initiated in 1990, the Human Genome Project (HGP) involved the cooperative work of hundreds of scientists in 20 sequencing centres in countries including China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan and the United States. The achievement is significant. Not only has it given a glimpse into the extraordinary complexity of the structure of human DNA but it has also demonstrated the huge potential of cooperative scientific endeavour organised on an international basis. The HGP was finished two and a half years ahead of schedule with all goals completed and for considerably less than the estimated budget. [snip]

US National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) director Francis Collins, who led the project, summed up its significance on April 14, by declaring: “The HGP has been an amazing adventure into ourselves, to understand our own DNA instruction book, the shared inheritance of all humankind.”

2007 – DNA-Based MS Vaccine Undergoes Successful Trial

The first human trial of a DNA-based vaccine to combat multiple sclerosis has been declared a success by doctors in America after tests on patients revealed signs that their condition had improved. However, the trial is only the first small step in developing an effective treatment against the debilitating degenerative disease, which affects about 85,000 people in the UK.

The vaccine works by dampening down the immune system, which is believed to become overactive in people who develop multiple sclerosis.

The disease is caused by a small group of immune cells that start to attack the body by targeting the fatty sheaths of myelin that coat nerves in the central nervous system. After waves of attacks, the nerves are eventually destroyed. The myelin coating helps to ensure that signals passed along the nerves travel quickly.

Doctors led by Amit Bar-Or at the Montreal Neurological Institute in Canada developed a vaccine which contains the strands of DNA that produce myelin.

2007 – Oldest Known DNA Reveals Secrets of Greenland

Picture this: sweeping conifer forests, with pine, alder, spruce and yew trees, crawling with beetles, flies and spiders, and with butterflies fluttering through the sun-dappled branches. It does not sound like a description of Greenland, but scientists say this is what the island looked like half a million years ago. They were able to paint the picture by extracting what is probably the oldest-known DNA from the ice at the base of the Greenland ice sheet.

A Danish-led team, including the Australian researcher Michael Bunce, extracted the ancient DNA from the muddy bottoms of cores drilled deep into the ice cap in southern Greenland. The researchers identified genetic traces of a surprising variety of tree species, including spruce, pine and yew. The team believes the DNA is between 450,000 and 800,000 years old, based on their analysis of insect genetic material.

2008 – Oldest human DNA isolated

DNA from dried human excrement recovered from Oregon’s Paisley Caves is the oldest found yet in the New World — dating to 14,300 years ago, some 1,200 years before Clovis culture — and provides apparent genetic ties to Siberia or Asia, according to an international team of 13 scientists.

[snip]

“Had the human coprolites at the Paisley Caves not been analyzed for DNA and subjected to rigorous dating methodology,” he added, “the pre-Clovis age of the artifacts recovered with the megafaunal remains could not have been conclusively proven. In other words, the pre-Clovis-aged component of this site could very well have been missed or dismissed by archaeologists.”

The thing about science is, it can make anything fascinating, even the weather.

Back when I was a college student looking for an easy way to meet my dreaded science requirements, I pounced on our college’s Physical Geography course. It didn’t have any yucky math. It would help me create fantasy worlds. Looked like it had a lot of geography in it. What I didn’t realize when I signed on was that it also contained a bunch of the stuff I considered deadly dull: meterology and climatology being right up there with Subjects Assured to Put Me to Sleep.

And Jim Bennett wasn’t going to let us off the hook. Noper. One of the first things he decided to teach was meterology. I nearly quit the class. Despite the fact Mr. Bennett had a great sense of humor – this is the man who, as our local TV station’s weather forecaster, once whipped out half an umbrella because there was a 50% chance of rain that day – I thought I was in for the most boring week of my life.

By the end, I was wishing we’d do nothing but the weather.

Weather is one of the most complex phenomena in existence. So many factors impact it that it’s a wonder we can predict it at all. The angle of incidence of the sun, the physical characteristics of the surface it’s striking, temperature and moisture differences between regions

, pressure differences, and even the weather itself all have an impact on the weather. This is ignoring the important factor of little things like mountains being in the way, or the axial tilt of the earth, or indeed its rotation… oh, and did I mention, the atmosphere’s a chaotic system, so wee little changes in one bit lead to ginormous changes later on? Those damned butterflies and their wingflapping!

The thing is, though, it makes enough sense that even a rank amateur such as myself could look at the whispy little clouds in the sky on a bright, clear day and announce to my astonished friends that tomorrow it would rain – and be right. That’s always fun.

(Mind you, that was Arizona, where such things as predicting rain can earn you respect. Here in Seattle, folks just tend to look at you and say, “Well, duh.”)

Weather is huge, and weather is beautiful. Weather is interesting. Even the hydrologic cycle is fascinating. Who would have thought that something so simple as a little evaporation and condensation could cause such dramatic weather systems? I don’t think a diagram can really capture the scope of it. Alas, we don’t have Jim Bennett here doing his gymnastics – watching him go up on tiptoes waving his hands, swooping across the front of the classroom and imitating rain, was what made this bit so fun. Just use your imagination.

Our weather relies on oceans. Those great transporters of heat, cold and energy drive more weather than you can possibly imagine. I hadn’t realized before studying phy

sical geography that if you change the way the ocean circulates, you change the weather. El Nino, La Nina, and a bajillion other circulation changes large and small dictate what kind of weather we’ll experience over a season. The way the currents move dictate whether you can grow palm trees in England, or shall be freezing your arse off in Labrador. Same latitude, wildly different climes. If we cut off the Gulf Stream, England would freeze.

This is where plate tectonics has an interesting contribution to make to the weather. You see, when the continents move, they change the currents, which changes climate and weather, and that’s damned interesting.

Let’s move away from charts and get into some of the awesomeness, shall we?

Everybody loves a tornado. Not being in one, mind, but the power and thrill of seeing one from a safe distance. Get yourself some cold, dry air colliding with warm, moist air in a location where the winds can really get to whipping, and you’ve got yourself a strong possibility of touchdown. For a nice, succinct description of the science of tornadoes, start here. Or just watch a lot of courageous buggers on the Science Channel chase the storms – that’s always instructive. It gives you a true sense of the power of weather when you see scientists dropping off equipment and then fleeing for dear life.

Tornadoes and wind have plenty in common. Wind starts when you’ve got a difference in air pressure – air flows from areas of high pressure to low. I once demonstrated this nicely for our physical geography class by having a photograph of myself taken at the blowhole

at Wupatki National Monument – the air blasting out of the high pressure inside the cave to the lower pressure outside set my hair nicely a-whirl. On a larger scale, the Coriolis force from our rotating planet affects how the winds blow. There’s all kinds of different winds, from the mildest breezes to the steady sea winds that caused these trees to grow at decidedly odd angles. Amazing what a little moving air can do, eh?

“White as the driven snow” is one of those hackneyed old phrases that’s not scientifically accurate in t

he least. Snow’s actually clear, just like polar bear fur – it’s the amount of light the flakes reflect that make it seem white. And Eskimos don’t really have 100 words for snow, but science comes pretty close – skim down the list on Wikipedia, and you’ll be surprised by how many varieties there are. In Arizona, we pretty much stuck with the vanilla varieties – powder on cold days, packing snow on the warmer. I know the skiers liked the powder variety, but you’ve got to have yourself a good packing snow in order to make truly complicated snow forts. Which we did, without ever realizing that our fun wouldn’t have been possible were it not for the vagaries of elevation. Flagstaff, you see, is just at that elevation where the adiabatic temperature change coupled with a ginormous mountain forcing warm, moist air up where it could condense ensured we’d have plenty of winter wonderment.

What, you’re shocked Arizona gets snow? You need to get out more. Arizona’s got everything. We even got a hurricane once. And in a few million years, we’ll have a coastline, too.

Another thing we have is the world’s most incredible lightning. Scientists, photographers and siteseers flock to Tucson, where the lightning strikes light up the universe. The storms there are truly incredible. The science of lightning, hundreds of years after Ben Franklin and his infamous kite, still isn’t complete, but there are some good theories as to how the whole production gets started. The polarization mechanism hypothesis is pretty sexy – it has two components, and a key, thusly:

1. Falling droplets of ice and rain become electrically polarized as they fall through the atmosphere’s natural electric field;
2. Colliding ice particles become charged by electrostatic induction.

Ice and supercooled water are the keys to the process. Violent winds buffet tiny hailstones as they form, causing them to collide. When the hailstones hit ice crystals, some negative ions transfer from one particle to another. The smaller particles lose negative ions and become positive and the larger more massive particles gain negative ions and become negative.

Sounds about right to this Arizona girl, who knows that those enormous thunderheads contain plenty of ice crystals, hail and wind. Whatever its beginnings, its end result is truly spectacular – how many other things in this world can heat the air to twice the temperature of the Sun? And leave fossil trails in the form of fused silica?

After all that, it might be nice to immerse ourselves in a calm, soothing rain. If you haven’t got any where you are, feel free to join me in Seattle, where light, misty rains are our specialty. But don’t expect teardrop shapes – you’re getting spheres, hamburger buns, or parachutes, depending on the size of the drop. And you can expect more rain on Saturday in areas with a lot of pollution building up during the week. Plan accordingly.

One of the most interest

ing aspects of weather and climate in the rain department is the rainshadow effect. You get a spectacular example of that here in Washington, where the Cascades force the clouds to climb. That warm, moist air condenses and cools on its way up, dumps most of its payload on the western flanks of the range, and leaves eastern Washington a lot drier.

In Arizona, rain followed a monsoon pattern. And yes, we do get rain there, every summer regularly. The thing is, it usually evaporates so fast you barely know it was there. You might not be able to photograph dragonflies with rain on.

Convinced of the beauty of the weather? Want more? Good. Cuz I’ve got animations for ye courtesy of Edupedia, and NOAA’s wonderful weather site complete with tutorials. And if that’s still not enough, remember: there’s a whole solar system full of weather out there. Amazingly enough, you’ll find that, just like with weather patterns in Asia having an effect half a world away, what happens 98,000,000 miles away has some pretty spectacular local impacts.

Incredible, ne c’est pas? And here you thought weather was boring.

Al Gore issued America a challenge on global warming that left me stunned: A Generational Challenge to Repower America. No other political speech has ever galvanized me like this. We’re used to hearing scientists sound the alarm and tell the world it needs to act now to stop the slide into climate chaos. No one else has ever come out with such force to say we can.

We have the science. We have the technology. We have the need. All that we need now is the will, and Gore’s speech has the power to give us that. He takes something enormous and makes it seem almost simple.

So I’m handing Sunday Sensational Science over to him. I’ve excerpted key points from his speech, and I hope you send this to friends, family, coworkers, and politicians. They need to hear that clean energy and freedom from fossil fuels is possible. Not in 50 years, or 30, or 20, but in 10.

Global warming is real. But even if you don’t believe that, there are other critical reasons why we should still work together to make clean energy our immediate future.

I don’t remember a time in our country when so many things seemed to be going so wrong simultaneously. Our economy is in terrible shape and getting worse, gasoline prices are increasing dramatically, and so are electricity rates. Jobs are being outsourced. Home mortgages are in trouble. Banks, automobile companies and other institutions we depend upon are under growing pressure. Distinguished senior business leaders are telling us that this is just the beginning unless we find the courage to make some major changes quickly.

The climate crisis, in particular, is getting a lot worse – much more quickly than predicted. Scientists with access to data from Navy submarines traversing underneath the North polar ice cap have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months. This will further increase the melting pressure on Greenland. According to experts, the Jakobshavn glacier, one of Greenland’s largest, is moving at a faster rate than ever before, losing 20 million tons of ice every day, equivalent to the amount of water used every year by the residents of New York City.

From Science Daily, by way of A Blog Around the Clock, comes the news that there’s a whole lotta coral reef out there we didn’t even realize existed:

Scientists have announced the discovery of reef structures they believe doubles the size of the Southern Atlantic Ocean’s largest and richest reef system, the Abrolhos Bank, off the southern coast of Brazil’s Bahia state. The newly discovered area is also far more abundant in marine life than the previously known Abrolhos reef system, one of the world’s most unique and important reefs.

Amazing that something so huge hid from us for so long. This world still has a lot of surprises in store for us. And in a time when so many coral reefs are under severe threat of extinction, it’s good to know there’s a whole previously undiscovered one alive and kicking.

It seems the IDiots see irreducible complexity wherever they look. The eye? Irreducible! Bacterial flagellum? Irreducible! Flowers? Irreducible!

They got pwnd on everything else. It was only a matter of time before the incredible, beautiful complexity of flowers turned out to be – gasp! – far from irreducible.

It turns out that this intricate dance between pollinator and pollen-producer was choreographed long, long ago, in fits and starts, by none other than our good friend evolution. I’m sure you’re all astonished by this. Why don’t you spend a moment relaxing with this study of butterfly on flower while your heart recovers from the jolt. Then we’ll get into the details.

Papilio Rumanzovia Butterfly on Flower Philippines

Christopher Taylor at Catalogue of Organisms introduces us to some of the earliest flowers, and teaches an IDiot troll that when scientists say things like “sudden explosion of flowering plants,” what they really mean is, “sudden on a geological timescale, which isn’t very sudden at all.” To do this, he introduces some precursors like our good friend Bennettitales here:

“What Bennettitales did have, however, were flowers (of a sort). The leaves of the strobilus were expanded into flower-like bracts that were quite large (and possibly quite colourful) in a number of taxa. Certain features of the bennettitalean bracts suggest that they had a role in attracting insect pollinators, just as modern flowers do today (Gottsberger, 1988). The largest bennettitalean “flowers” were found in Cycadeoidea, which had the bracts recurved to enclose a central chamber containing the reproductive organs. This is of great significance because similar arrangements are found in modern beetle-pollinated flowers, which are believed to be among the more basal flower forms.”

Total shock to the system, innit? Imagine a flowering plant evolving, of all things. And not even evolving for simple human pleasure, but because the selfish buggers wanted to attract beetles. They had no idea Buddhists would come by millions of years later needing an inspiration for the Lotus Sutra.

When you get right down to it, flowers are very Buddhist. They don’t have wants and desires. They just go with the flow. The ones that successfully attract various pollinating insects end up evolving fantastic variations of petals, color, and scent, but there’s no intention there. Doesn’t have to be. Things just take care of themselves.

“The earliest major pollinators of flowers were probably beetles and flies (Kevan & Baker, 1983). Beetles in particular are the major pollinators of members of basal angiosperm orders such as Magnoliales and Nymphaeales. The two insect groups most commonly associated with pollination in most peoples minds, butterflies and bees, were unlikely to have been significant players in the origin of flowers for the simple reason that neither had come into existence yet – Lepidoptera as a whole only started making an appearance during the Cretaceous, while bees were not to appear until the Tertiary. As already noted, many of the basal angiosperm groups show adaptations towards beetle pollination (this is why magnolias, for instance, produce such a powerful perfume and white flowers – nocturnal beetles use smell more in finding food, while white stands out more at night than colour would). Many beetle-pollinated flowers have some sort of enclosed chamber, or close during the day, providing their pollinators with a safe haven from predators as well as providing food in the form of nectar or pollen…”

Sometimes, nature really does nurture. And I’m sure this kind of unintentional symbiotic relationship makes the IDiots scream for joy, because they just can’t seem to wrap their heads around the fact that the result can drive the cause. We don’t yet know all of the details of how plants went from no flowers to full bloom, but we can definitely understand that early mutations causing flower-like forms to appear would be encouraged to elaborate as the whole beetle-flower relationship developed. Plants that had “flowers” thrived, those lacking them didn’t. Plants with better flowers spread more pollen via their beetle vectors. Plants with inferior flowers didn’t. Beetles that figured out how to hide in flowers survived while those who stayed outside got munched. Give that a few million years, and you’ve got flowers everywhere, along with insects who know how to take advantage of them.

But that’s not half as strong an argument as this simple proof:

“Insect-attracting strobili such as found in Bennettitales could have quite easily given rise to the first flowers. Developmental genetics has confirmed the theory put forward many years previously that petals and sepals represent modified leaves, and by affecting the expression of the genes involved it has proved possible to make leaves grow instead of petals, and petals grow instead of leaves (Goto et al., 2001). “

This is why I love genetics so. Isn’t that exquisite proof that evolution didn’t need to come up with major modifications to create something brand new? All evolution needs is a chance to modify what’s already there. It’s almost as gorgeous as wisteria blooming in Seattle.

All right. It’s just as gorgeous. You just can’t stick it in a vase is all.

Accidents sometimes lead to glorious things, especially in science. Consider Sir Alexander Fleming and the mold that contaminated his bacterial experiment – penicillin. Penzias and Wilson, employing Bell Labs’ ginormous new antenna as a radio telescope, got driven batty by a uniform background noise that didn’t go away even after they chucked out the pigeons – cosmic background radiation, the remnant of the Big Bang. Antoine Henri Bequerel needed bright sunlight in his hunt for x-rays, but after he’d gone to all the trouble of sprinkling his crystals of potassium uranyl sulfate on a photographic negative, Paris got cloudy. Bored off his arse, he developed the film anyway – and discovered the existence of radioactivity.

Science history is full of those chance events, happy accidents and lucky juxtapositions that open up whole new vistas. And I mention this because of my own happy accident – I discovered an incredible site celebrating the sheer beauty of science because I was looking for an interesting equation to illustrate COTEB #2 with.

Paul A. Titze runs Wizlab.com, an extraordinary place filled with glorious science photos and quotes. Opening that page instantly kicks the sense of wonder into overdrive. Science and art aren’t separate entities there: science is art, and I don’t think I could’ve been struck any harder by awe if I’d stepped into a gallery full of the greatest paintings, sculpture and poems in human history.

You know those moments when your breath catches, and a smile takes over your entire self? I had one of those, all the way down the page.

He’s captured it all: the beauty, the power, the philosophy and the sheer poetry of science. Why do we do science, what meaning does it have beyond the practical considerations, where did it come from and where is it going – all of those questions and more are answered there. I’ll never have to explain why I love science ever again. All I have to do is give inquirers a web address. If they don’t leave there awestruck, I’ll know that nothing I could possibly say is ever going to explain how science feels to those who truly love it.

Paul Titze’s no mean poet, either. Along with the evocative quotes from centuries of sensational scientists, along with the incredible photos, graphs, and animations, you can find his lines:

For I marvel of countless wonders in this Universe, and wonder,

Will the milky ocean reveal its secrets at such faraway isles,

Will the Lighthouse Keepers help me answer the riddle,

And if I lose my way, follow the Wandering Albatross, he knows the way.

-from “The Riddle”

And then there’s the equations.

I was going to use this one for COTEB, but decided to filch the Mandlebrot Set instead. I found a lot of pictures of Maxwell’s equations that were bracketed by Genesis in my searches – this photo says more. Can you hear it?

Science sings on this site. Lash yourself to the mast before you head over there, my darlings, or you may never return.

There’s water on that thar planet!

There’s been a lot of talk over the years about water on Mars. But this is the first time we’ve had definitive proof of water ice, and it even melts! Check out the lower left corner of these photos, returned by Phoenix:

See there? Those white chunks that vanished – that’s water! You can see an animated version here that really makes it pop.

This is huge.

Where there is water, there is life, at least on Earth. As part of NASA’s ongoing expedition to ‘Follow the Water,’ Phoenix is looking for signs of habitable zones, not biological life per se. It does not have the equipment to look into the ice for microbial lifeforms.

Nevertheless, if any type of Martian lifeform existed that could be seen with the naked human eye, say a Martian beetle living under a rock, the lander could easily detect it and photograph it. And, there are a few intriguing rocks in the area that the scientists’ have been eyeing. “There are rocks in our vicinity and I think half the scientists here are very curious to flip one over and see if there’s anything living beneath it or if there’s a salt concentration,” acknowledged Smith.

I don’t think the general public usually thinks of scientists as a demonstrative lot – they seem to believe scientists are a bunch of Vulcans without the weird eyebrows and pointy ears – but I can guarantee you we’ll see the scientists studying this data seriously losing their composure if a bug crawls out from under a rock.

I’m just never going to hear the end of it if we find life on Mars. My father thinks life originated there – or possibly on Venus, one of the two – and I’ve tended to chuckle at him. But imagine – we’ve just found water on Mars. Future missions will equip us to look for fossils. Can you just picture the size of the crow I’m going to have to eat if it turns out that panspermia from Mars is indeed what started life on Earth?

I’ve got a full bottle of ketchup handy, and a glass of wine to toast this mission with. One day, kids are going to look at me like I’m a nut for being so exicted over this – ‘duh, there’s water on Mars, everybody knows that’ – but there’s a chance they’ll understand just how shocking, how exhilirating, it is to know for the first time.

When I was a child, water on Mars was pretty much a myth: the poles were nothing more than carbon dioxide ice, the place was barren and lifeless, everybody knew that.

Everybody except for a few scientists crunching numbers and saying, “Hmmm. You know what…”

And my dad.

And a few freaks, but we’ve always got those.

This week, we know. We’ve got the evidence, melting right before our eyes. If that doesn’t provoke a sense of wonder, I don’t know what will. Even if Phoenix doesn’t find life on Mars, hell, there’s water. Water’s all over the place. We’re finding more in the universe all the time. And like A.J.S. Rayl said, “Where there is water, there is life…”

In a few years – or tomorrow – Rayl may not have to add that “at least on Earth” caveat anymore. If not because of Mars, because of another world where life arose from the ubiquitous water.

Talk about sensational….