University of Washington graduate student Jose Ceballos wears an EEG cap that records brain activity and sends a response to a second participant over the Internet. (UW photo)
When the calendar turns, it’s time to reflect on the biggest sensations of the past year: Time’s Person of the Year, AP’s Top News Story, Hollywood’s Oscar picks — and, of course, the Weirdies.
This year’s lineup includes a couple of projects from the University of Washington, which provides a nice Seattle angle for GeekWire’s first running of the Weirdies. Without further ado, here’s the top 10:
UW graduate student Sean LaHusen points to buried debris at a landslide site on the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River. (Credit: Alison Duvall / UW)
A newly published analysis of the geological record for the area around the site of 2014’s Oso landslide shows that the slopes have been collapsing every 140 years or so on average. That’s significantly more frequent than previously estimated.
Based on laser elevation measurements and radiocarbon dating of woody debris around the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River, researchers from the University of Washington found that a collapse five times as big as the Oso event, known as the Rowan landslide, took place sometime between 300 and 694 years ago.
The researchers’ study, published online by the journal Geology on Tuesday, came up with an average collapse rate of once per 500 years for the area around Oso, Wash., over the course of thousands of years. Over the past 2,000 years, the average rate has been about 140 years, the scientists said.
A portion of Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct was demolished in 2011 to reduce the road’s vulnerability to earthquake damage. Scientists say the Pacific Northwest could experience a magnitude-9 quake and tsunami like the one that hit Japan in 2011. (Credit: WSDOT)
The omnibus spending bill that was approved by Congress today includes another $8.2 million for a quake-monitoring system that could provide early warning if we’re hit by “the Really Big One” that everyone’s been freaked out about.
Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Derek Kilmer, both D-Wash., had pushed for the additional support and issued a statement applauding the legislative follow-through.
“An updated and operational Earthquake Early Warning System is essential to serve as eyes and ears for folks on the West Coast,” Kilmer said. “A few crucial seconds can make all the difference to help Washingtonians get out of harm’s way if a large quake strikes.”
The omnibus bill was signed into law by President Barack Obama.
Researchers have long been concerned about the potential for the Cascadia Subduction Zone to unleash a magnitude-9.0 quake off the coast of Washington and Oregon. The concern was heightened in July by a scary report in The New Yorker, headlined “The Really Big One.”
Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, takes questions at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco. (Credit: AGU)
Policymakers have been debating – and dismissing – the idea of putting a tax on carbon emissions for more than a decade, but the way billionaire innovator Elon Musk sees it, the concept is a no-brainer.
The 44-year-old CEO of the SpaceX rocket venture and the Tesla electric car company laid out his rationale today in San Francisco during a webcast chat at theAmerican Geophysical Union’s fall meeting. He said not paying a carbon tax is like not paying for garbage collection.
An artist’s conception shows a submersible vehicle mapping the ocean depths. (Credit: XPRIZE)
The latest high-tech competition from XPRIZE is offering $7 million to promote new ways to map our planet’s final frontier: the depths of the ocean.
“Our oceans cover two-thirds of our planet’s surface and are a crucial global source of food, energy, economic security, and even the air we breathe, yet 95 percent of the deep sea remains a mystery to us,” Peter Diamandis, XPRIZE chairman and CEO, said in a news release. “In fact, we have better maps of the surface of Mars than we do of our own seafloor.”
The Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE is meant to accelerate innovation in deep-sea mapping. Diamandis unveiled the three-year competition today during the American Geophysical Society’s fall meeting in San Francisco. He was joined on stage by representatives of the contest’s sponsors, Shell and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The teams that enter the contest will have to complete a series of tasks, including making a map of the seafloor, producing high-resolution images of a specific object, and identifying archaeological, biological or geological features. The technologies have to work at depths of up to 4,000 meters (2.5 miles).
General Fusion’s Brendan Cassidy shows off a test reactor in Burnaby, B.C. (Photo by Alan Boyle)
It’s not clear when fusion power will pay off, but there’s a way to earn a cool $20,000 in fusion research. And you don’t even have to be a plasma physicist or an energy entrepreneur.
All you have to do is make perfect sense out of the data generated by the plasma experiments being conducted by General Fusion in Burnaby, B.C.
“The challenge is basically to come up with a metric for predicting the performance of a plasma shot,” Brendan Cassidy, the company’s crowdsourcing project leader, told GeekWire.
General Fusion is a private venture that’s attracted tens of millions of dollars in venture capital, including investments from Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. Over the past five years or so, the company has conducted about 100,000 experiments. Those experiments, or shots, involve injecting blobs of super-heated hydrogen gas into plasma chambers and studying how they behave. A single shot lasts somewhere around a thousandth of a second.
“Our shot data includes signals from nearly 100 probes measuring things like magnetic field strength, plasma density and the spectral composition of plasma light,” Cassidy explained in a blog post outlining the challenge. “There are also configuration settings for each shot, and calculated single point, or scalar, metrics.”
The quality of the plasma varies from shot to shot, and General Fusion’s researchers don’t fully understand why. It’d be nice to distill the shot data into algorithms that predict which settings will produce the best shots.
Toward that end, hundreds of gigabytes of data from previous shots are being made available for a challenge titled “Data-Driven Prediction of Plasma Performance.” After signing up, competitors can download the data, look for correlations and patterns, devise their algorithms and send them in for evaluation by March 9.
A Fermilab scientist works on the laser beams at the heart of the Holometer experiment. The Holometer uses twin laser interferometers to look for evidence of quantum jitters. (Credit: Reidar Hahn / Fermilab)
Is our universe a two-dimensional hologram? It sounds like science fiction straight from “The Matrix,” but scientists are checking out the hypothesis for real. So far, the answer is no.
The experiments are being conducted at Fermilab in Illinois, using a gnarly-looking device known as the Holometer. The apparatus is designed to measure the smoothness of spacetime at lengths down to a billionth of a billionth of a meter. Put another way, that’s a thousand times smaller than the size of a proton.
The standard view is that the fabric of reality is continuous – but some theories propose that spacetime is pixelated, like a digital image. If that’s the case, there’s a built-in limit to the “resolution” of reality.
The Holometer uses a pair of high-power laser interferometers to look for tiny discontinuities in movements that last only a millionth of a second. Such discontinuities would provide evidence of holographic noise, or quantum jitters, in spacetime.
A 3-D animation shows how DNA can be used in computational devices. (Credit: Microsoft Research)
Data storage is getting better and better, but the final frontier for the long-term preservation of digital bits may well be DNA molecules – and the University of Washington and Microsoft Research are trying to make it so.
Such a system would take advantage of DNA’s amazing information storage capability – the kind of capability that’s able to hold all the genetic code for any organism in a single cell. The Times notes that all of the world’s digital information could be stored in about 2.4 gallons (9 liters) of solution, which would fit inside a typical water cooler bottle.
The benefits of such a system not only include being able to put a lot of data in a small space, but also being able to preserve the data for millennia under the right conditions.
NASA astronaut Michael Hopkins reads a book titled “Max Goes to the Space Station” in 2014 during a space station outreach activity called Story Time From Space. (Credit: NASA / STFS)
In this age of e-readers, there are still occasions when it’s nice to have a book printed on actual paper – like holiday giving, for instance. But which book works best as a gift for a science geek?
In honor of the 12 days of Christmas, here are a dozen recently published science books that have been well-received and are well-suited for gift wrapping. And if you still want to save a tree, some of them work just fine as e-books as well.
Between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, give a little thought to what’ll tickle the science geek on your gift list. We’re not talking about the “10 best gadgets” or cutting-edge technology here. Just a few little somethings (or big somethings) that play off our sense of wonder or just plain gearheadedness.
Check out five ideas to play with for the holidays.
