Scientists discover brain region that responds to clitoris

WASHINGTON - A new scientific study published Monday has identified the brain region linked to genital touch in women, and found that it was more developed in volunteers who reported having more sex.

The research involved stimulating the clitorises of 20 adult females while their brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

The researchers clarify that the paper, published in the journal JNeurosci, does not answer questions like whether having a larger area devoted to genital stimulation makes women more sensitive to touch. 

It also doesn't tell us whether having a more developing brain region devoted to genital touch prompts more intercourse, or whether more intercourse expands the region, like working out a muscle.

But the results could be used in future to target treatments for people who have, for example, been impacted by sexual violence, or have sexual dysfunction.

"It's completely under studied, how the female genitals are represented in the somatosensory cortex in humans, and whether it has at all the capacity to change in relation to experience or use," co-author Christine Heim, a professor of medical psychology at Charite University Hospital in Berlin, told AFP.

BODY MAP

The somatosensory cortex receives and processes sensory information from across the body. Each part of the body corresponds to a different area of the cortex, forming a representational map.

But until now, the part of the map that corresponds to the female genitals was a subject of debate.

Previous studies had sometimes placed it under the representation of the foot, others near that of the hip. 

The reason was imprecise stimulation techniques -- for example, during self or partner delivered manual stimulation, other parts of the body were touched at the same time, or the process triggered arousal, which blurred the results.

In 2005, other researchers were able to develop a technique that caused very localized tactile stimulation for penises, allowing them to find the precise region devoted to this area in males. But there was no similar breakthrough for females.

For the new study, 20 women in good health between the ages of 18 and 45 were selected.

For stimulation, a small round object specifically designed for the task was applied above the underwear at the level of the clitoris. Air jets caused the device's membrane to vibrate slightly.

The approach was designed to be "as comfortable as possible" for the volunteers, said co-author John-Dylan Haynes of the Berlin Center for Advanced Neuroimaging at Charite.

They were stimulated eight times, for 10 seconds each time, interspersed with 10 seconds of rest. The same device was used on the back of the right hand as a control.

The results of the brain imaging confirmed that the somatosensory cortex represented the female genitals next to the hips -- as they are in males -- but the precise location varied for each woman tested.

PLASTICITY

The researchers then investigated whether this area had different characteristics depending on sexual activity. 

The 20 women were asked about the frequency of their intercourse over the past year, as well as since the beginning of their sexual life.

Then, for each of them, the researchers determined the ten most activated points in the brain during stimulation, and measured the thickness of those areas.

"We found an association between the frequency of genital intercourse and the thickness of the individually mapped genital field," said Heim. The more sex, the bigger the region.

The authors are hesitant to say more sex drives that expansion, until future study confirms it.

But there are hints from past research. First, it's well established that the more certain parts of the brain are used, the bigger they become: this is known as brain plasticity. The hippocampus region of the brain in London taxi drivers expands with navigating experience.

Second, prior animal studies showed that the stimulation of the genitals of rats and mice effectively led to an expansion of the area of the brain corresponding to these organs. 

That research also did not determine whether a larger area resulted in better perception. 

But Heim herself had previously shown in a 2013 study that people who have suffered traumatic sexual violence had a thinning of the brain areas devoted to genitals.

"We speculated back then, that this could be the response of the brain to limit the detrimental perception of the abuse," she said.

She hopes her research will help inform future therapies aimed at rehabilitating this region among abuse survivors.

Agence France-Presse

‘When will it end?’: How a changing virus is reshaping scientists’ views on COVID-19

CHICAGO — Chris Murray, a University of Washington disease expert whose projections on COVID-19 infections and deaths are closely followed worldwide, is changing his assumptions about the course of the pandemic.

Murray had until recently been hopeful that the discovery of several effective vaccines could help countries achieve herd immunity, or nearly eliminate transmission through a combination of inoculation and previous infection. But in the last month, data from a vaccine trial in South Africa showed not only that a rapidly-spreading coronavirus variant could dampen the effect of the vaccine, it could also evade natural immunity in people who had been previously infected.

“I couldn’t sleep” after seeing the data, Murray, director of the Seattle-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, told Reuters. “When will it end?” he asked himself, referring to the pandemic. He is currently updating his model to account for variants’ ability to escape natural immunity and expects to provide new projections as early as this week.

A new consensus is emerging among scientists, according to Reuters interviews with 18 specialists who closely track the pandemic or are working to curb its impact. Many described how the breakthrough late last year of two vaccines with around 95% efficacy against COVID-19 had initially sparked hope that the virus could be largely contained, similar to the way measles has been.

But, they say, data in recent weeks on new variants from South Africa and Brazil has undercut that optimism. They now believe that SARS-CoV-2 will not only remain with us as an endemic virus, continuing to circulate in communities, but will likely cause a significant burden of illness and death for years to come.

As a result, the scientists said, people could expect to continue to take measures such as routine mask-wearing and avoiding crowded places during COVID-19 surges, especially for people at high risk.

Even after vaccination, “I still would want to wear a mask if there was a variant out there,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to U.S. President Joe Biden, said in an interview. “All you need is one little flick of a variant (sparking) another surge, and there goes your prediction” about when life gets back to normal.

Some scientists, including Murray, acknowledge that the outlook could improve. The new vaccines, which have been developed at record speed, still appear to prevent hospitalizations and death even when new variants are the cause of infection. Many vaccine developers are working on booster shots and new inoculations that could preserve a high level of efficacy against the variants. And, scientists say there is still much to be learned about the immune system’s ability to combat the virus.

Already, COVID-19 infection rates have declined in many countries since the start of 2021, with some dramatic reductions in severe illness and hospitalizations among the first groups of people to be vaccinated.

Worse than flu

Murray said if the South African variant, or similar mutants, continue to spread rapidly, the number of COVID-19 cases resulting in hospitalization or death this coming winter could be four times higher than the flu. The rough estimate assumes a 65% effective vaccine given to half of a country’s population. In a worst-case scenario, that could represent as many as 200,000 U.S. deaths related to COVID-19 over the winter period, based on federal government estimates of annual flu fatalities.

His institute’s current forecast, which runs to June 1, assumes there will be an additional 62,000 U.S. deaths and 690,000 global deaths from COVID-19 by that point. The model includes assumptions about vaccination rates as well as the transmissibility of the South African and Brazilian variants.

The shift in thinking among scientists has influenced more cautious government statements about when the pandemic will end. Britain last week said it expects a slow emergence from one of the world’s strictest lockdowns, despite having one of the fastest vaccination drives.

U.S. government predictions of a return to a more normal lifestyle have been repeatedly pushed back, most recently from late summer to Christmas, and then to March 2022. Israel issues “Green Pass” immunity documents to people who have recovered from COVID-19 or been vaccinated, allowing them back into hotels or theaters. The documents are only valid for six months because it’s not clear how long immunity will last.

“What does it mean to be past the emergency phase of this pandemic?,” said Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. While some experts have asked whether countries could completely eradicate any case of COVID-19 through vaccines and stringent lockdowns, Baral sees the goals as more modest, but still meaningful. “In my mind, it’s that hospitals aren’t full, the ICUs aren’t full, and people aren’t tragically passing,” he said.

’Scientific whiplash’

From the beginning, the new coronavirus has been a moving target.

Early in the pandemic, leading scientists warned that the virus could become endemic and “may never go away,” including Dr. Michael Ryan, head of the World Health Organization’s emergencies program.

Yet they had much to learn, including whether it would be possible to develop a vaccine against the virus and how quickly it would mutate. Would it be more like measles, which can be kept almost entirely at bay in communities with high rates of inoculation, or flu, which infects millions globally each year?

For much of 2020, many scientists were surprised and reassured that the coronavirus had not changed significantly enough to become more transmissible, or deadly.

A major breakthrough came in November. Pfizer Inc and its German partner BioNTech SE as well as Moderna Inc said their vaccines were around 95% effective at preventing COVID-19 in clinical trials, an efficacy rate that is much higher than any flu shot.

At least a few of the scientists Reuters interviewed said even in the wake of those results, they hadn’t expected the vaccines to wipe out the virus. But many told Reuters that the data raised hope within the scientific community that it would be possible to virtually eliminate COVID-19, if only the world could be vaccinated quickly enough.

“We all felt quite optimistic before Christmas with those first vaccines,” said Azra Ghani, chair in infectious disease epidemiology at Imperial College London. “We didn’t necessarily expect such high-efficacy vaccines to be possible in that first generation.”

The optimism proved short-lived. In late December, the UK warned of a new, more transmissible variant that was quickly becoming the dominant form of the coronavirus in the country. Around the same time, researchers learned of the impact of the  faster-spreading variants in South Africa and in Brazil.

Phil Dormitzer, a top vaccine scientist at Pfizer, told Reuters in November that the U.S. drugmaker’s vaccine success signaled the virus was “vulnerable to immunization” in what he called “a breakthrough for humanity.” By early January, he acknowledged the variants heralded “a new chapter” in which companies will have to constantly monitor for mutations that could dampen the effect of vaccines.

In late January, the impact on vaccines became even clearer. Novavax’s clinical trial data showed its vaccine was 89% effective in a UK trial, but just 50% effective at preventing COVID-19 in South Africa.  That was followed a week later by data showing the AstraZeneca PLC vaccine offered only limited protection from mild disease against the South African variant.

The most recent change of heart was considerable, several of the scientists told Reuters. Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in San Diego, described it as “scientific whiplash”: In December, he had believed it was plausible to achieve so-called “functional eradication” of the coronavirus, similar to measles.

Now, “getting as many people vaccinated as possible is still the same answer and the same path forward as it was on December 1 or January 1,” Crotty said, “but the expected outcome isn’t the same.”

-Reuters

Scientists reveal first image ever made of a black hole

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists on Wednesday revealed the first image ever made of a black hole, depicting its hot, shadowy edges where light bends around itself in a cosmic funhouse effect.

Assembling data gathered by eight radio telescopes around the world, astronomers created the picture showing the violent neighborhood around a supermassive black hole, the light-sucking monsters of the universe theorized by Einstein more than a century ago and confirmed by observations for decades.


It looked like a flaming orange, yellow, and black ring.

“We have seen what we thought was unseeable. We have seen and taken a picture of a black hole. Here it is,” said Sheperd Doeleman of Harvard.

Jessica Dempsey, a co-discoverer and deputy director of the East Asian Observatory in Hawaii, said it reminded her of the powerful flaming Eye of Sauron from the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Unlike smaller black holes that come from collapsed stars, supermassive black holes are mysterious in origin. Situated at the center of most galaxies, including ours, they are so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull. This one’s “event horizon” — the point of no return around it, where light and matter begin to fall inexorably into the abyss — is as big as our entire solar system.

Three years ago, scientists using an extraordinarily sensitive observing system heard the sound of two much smaller black holes merging to create a gravitational wave, as Albert Einstein predicted. The new image, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and announced around the world in several news conferences, adds light to that sound.

Outside scientists suggested the achievement could be worthy of a Nobel Prize, just like the gravitational wave discovery.

While much around a black hole falls into a death spiral and is never to be seen again, the new image captures “lucky gas and dust” circling at just far enough to be safe and seen millions of years later on Earth, Dempsey said.

Taken over four days when astronomers had “to have the perfect weather all across the world and literally all the stars had to align,” the image helps confirm Einstein’s general relativity theory, Dempsey said. Einstein a century ago even predicted the symmetrical shape that scientists just found, she said.

“It’s circular, but on one side the light is brighter,” Dempsey said. That’s because that light is approaching Earth.

The measurements are taken at a wavelength the human eye cannot see, so the astronomers added color to the image. They chose “exquisite gold because this light is so hot,” Dempsey said. “Making it these warm gold and oranges makes sense.”

What the image shows is gas heated to millions of degrees by the friction of ever-stronger gravity, scientists said. And that gravity creates a funhouse effect where you see light from both behind the black hole and behind you as the light curves and circles around the black hole itself, said astronomer Avi Loeb, director of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard. (The lead scientists in the discovery are from Harvard, but Loeb was not involved.)

The project cost $50 million to $60 million, with $26 million of that coming from the National Science Foundation.

Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Ethan Vishniac, who was not part of the discovery team but edits the journal where the research was published, pronounced the image “an amazing technical achievement” that “gives us a glimpse of gravity in its most extreme manifestation.”

He added: “Pictures from computer simulations can be very pretty, but there’s literally nothing like a picture of the real universe, however fuzzy and monochromatic.”

“It’s just seriously cool,” said John Kormendy, a University of Texas astronomer who wasn’t part of the discovery team. “To see the stuff going down the tubes, so to speak, to see it firsthand. The mystique of black holes in the community is very substantial. That mystique is going to be made more real.”

There is a myth that says a black hole would rip you apart, but Loeb and Kormendy said the one pictured is so big, someone could fall into it and not be torn to pieces. But the person would never be seen from again.

Black holes are “like the walls of a prison. Once you cross it, you will never be able to get out and you will never be able to communicate,” Loeb said.

The first image is of a black hole in a galaxy called M87 that is about 53 million light years from Earth. One light year is 5.9 trillion miles, or 9.5 trillion kilometers. This black hole is about 6 billion times the mass of our sun.

The telescope data was gathered by the Event Horizon Telescope two years ago, but it took so long to complete the image because it was a massive undertaking, involving about 200 scientists, supercomputers and hundreds of terabytes of data delivered worldwide by plane. 


The team looked at two supermassive black holes, the M87 and the one at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. The one in our galaxy is closer but much smaller, so they both look the same size in the sky. But the more distant one was easier to take pictures of because it rotates more slowly.

“We’ve been hunting this for a long time,” Dempsey said. “We’ve been getting closer and closer with better technology.” /kga

source: technology.inquirer.net

Scientists: Possible new octopus species found near Hawaii

HONOLULU—Scientists say they have discovered what might be a new species of octopus while searching the Pacific Ocean floor near the Hawaiian Islands.

On Feb. 27, a team found a small light-colored octopus at a depth of about 2.5 miles in the ocean near Necker Island, said Michael Vecchione of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The octopus did not have fins and all of its suckers were in one row on each arm, Vecchione said.

The octopus “did not seem very muscular” and was light colored, he said.

“This resulted in a ghostlike appearance, leading to a comment on social media that it should be called Casper, like the friendly cartoon ghost. It is almost certainly an undescribed species …, ” he said in the statement posted on Wednesday on the NOAA website (http://1.usa.gov/1oXarVu.)

It’s unusual to find an octopus without fins so deep in the ocean, said Vecchione, who noted that the previous depths at which an octopus without fins was found were all less than 4,000 meters, or 2.5 miles.

Two scientists he has consulted “agreed that this is something unusual and is a depth record …,” said Vecchione, who is with NOAA’s National Systematics Laboratory.

The octopus was discovered during a search of the ocean floor by a remotely operated vehicle from NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer, he said.

source: technology.inquirer.net

Comet craft takes selfie amid landing fumble

BERLIN—A shadow was cast— literally—across Europe’s historic mission to land on and explore a comet. Scientists said on Thursday the landing craft not only bounced twice, it also came to rest next to a cliff that’s blocking sunlight from its solar panels.

The good news is that the lander Philae is stable and in good health: Its scientific instruments have already begun gathering reams of data to send back to Earth, including the first pictures taken from the surface of a comet.

The bad news is that its useful lifetime may now be much shorter.

With just a day or two left before the lander’s primary battery is exhausted, scientists were considering what acrobatic maneuvers to risk in order to get the solar panels out of the shadows so they can keep Philae going for a few more months.

First photos
The first photos sent back to Earth revealed the comet’s rocky terrain, including an image that showed one of the lander’s three feet in the corner of the frame. They indicate that Philae’s instruments are working properly, said Jean-Pierre Bibring, the lander’s lead scientist at the European Space Agency.

Before deciding whether to try to adjust the lander, scientists will spend the next day or two collecting as much data as possible while its primary battery still has energy.

The lander’s solar panels were designed to provide an extra hour of battery life each day after that, but this may not be possible now.

Cosmic first

“We see that we get less solar power than we planned for,” said Koen Geurts of the lander team.

“This, of course, has an impact on our … capabilities to conduct science for an extended period of time,” he said. “Unfortunately this is not a situation that we were hoping for.”

The lander scored a cosmic first on Wednesday, touching down on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko after a decade-long, 6.4-billion-kilometer (4-billion-mile) journey through space aboard its mother ship, Rosetta.

The comet is streaking through space at 65,983 km (41,000 miles), some 500,505,984 km (311 million miles) from Earth.

Thrusters fail

The landing was beset by a series of problems that began when thrusters meant to push Philae onto the comet failed. Then two harpoons, which should have anchored the lander to the surface, weren’t deployed.

This caused the lander to bounce off the comet and drift through the void for two hours before touching down again.

After a second smaller bounce, scientists believe it came to rest in a shallow crater on the comet’s 4-km-wide body, or nucleus.

Cliff meters away

“We are just in the shadow of a cliff,” Bibring said, adding that photos indicate the cliff could be just a few meters away. “We are in a shadow permanently, and that is part of the problem.”

Bibring and his colleagues stressed that the data they’ll be able to collect with the primary batteries alone will have made the landing worthwhile.

“A lot of science is getting covered now,” he said, noting that soon scientists will get their hands on a tomography of the comet and data showing whether the matter it is made of is magnetized.

Drilling is dangerous

But because the lander is just resting on the comet with nothing but low gravity holding it down, Philae will have to hold off on one of the most important experiments—drilling into the comet to extract some of the material buried beneath the surface.

Scientists want to analyze this material because it has remained almost unchanged for 4.5 billion years, making it something of a cosmic time capsule.

“Drilling without being anchored and without knowing how you are on the surface is dangerous. We might just tip over the lander,” said Stephan Ulamec, head of operations for Philae.

Gravity on the comet is 1/100,000th that of Earth, meaning the washing-machine-sized lander weighs just 1 gram (0.04 ounces) there.

In hibernation

Ground controllers will likely wait until the first big batch of data has been collected before attempting to adjust the lander so that its solar panels can catch the sun and charge its batteries.

Communication with the lander is slow, with signals taking more than 28 minutes to travel between Earth and the Rosetta orbiter flying above the comet.

Even if Philae uses up all its energy, it will remain on the comet in a mode of hibernation for the coming months.

The comet is on a six-and-a-half-year elliptical orbit around the sun, and at the moment it is getting closer. So, in theory, Philae could wake up again if the comet passes the sun in such a way that the solar panels catch more light, Ulamec said.

$1.6-B project

Meanwhile, the Rosetta orbiter will also use its 11 instruments to analyze the comet over the coming months.

Scientists hope the $1.6-billion project will help them better understand comets and other celestial objects, as well as possibly answer questions about the origins of life on Earth. AP

source: technology.inquirer.net

Crimson glory: All you need to know about the rare blood moon

SINGAPORE—Across the world on Wednesday, sky-watchers will be casting their gaze towards the heavens for a glimpse of the rare blood moon — where the moon appears reddish as a result of a total lunar eclipse.

This phenomenal cosmic event begins Wednesday before sunrise in North America, and is a cause for excitement among astronomy enthusiasts all over the world.  



Here are some interesting facts about this once-in-a-red-moon occurrence:

What is a blood moon?

When the Sun, Earth and Moon are aligned, a total lunar eclipse occurs and sees the Moon passing close to the centre of the Earth’s inner shadow – the umbra. The filtering and refracting effect of Earth’s atmosphere creates a blush on the face of the Moon, giving it a reddish hue.

Why is it significant?
Not only is this eclipse one of the most striking astronomical events visible from Earth, the blood moon can also be seen by the naked eye and does not require telescopes.

What’s the difference between lunar and solar eclipses?

For a solar eclipse to occur, the Moon must come between the Earth and Sun; for a lunar eclipse to happen, the Earth must come between the Sun and Moon.

In all instances, all three bodies must be nearly in a straight line.

In total solar eclipses, the Sun is darkened save for some wisps of light around its corona – as though a hairy sackcloth was held up in front of it. It is also termed a “sackcloth sun”.

In total lunar eclipses, the Moon is not completely darkened. Depending on the weather, the Earth’s atmosphere filters out blue rays, and what results is the Moon looking faintly dull orange or red. Hence the term, “blood moon”.

What are some noteworthy lunar eclipse dates?

The longest blood moon took place on July 23, 1888, and lasted one hour and 46 minutes.

The year 2011 marked the longest total lunar eclipse in a decade, lasting one hour and 35 minutes.

The shortest one is projected to occur on Nov 9, 2068, and is estimated to last just 18 minutes.

How often does a blood moon tetrad happen?

Blood moons are rare occurrences, and tonight’s one is even more so because it is one in a set of four eclipses – what astronomers call a tetrad.

Tetrads are so uncommon, that there was reportedly no tetrad for 300 years, between 1600 and 1900.

Tonight’s blood moon is said to be the second in a series that will happen over two years, with the first having taken place earlier this year in April. The third is slated for April 4, 2015, and the fourth on Sept 28, 2015.

The next tetrad is predicted for 2032-2033.

Interestingly, the ongoing 2014-2015 tetrad falls in the Hebrew year 5775 – which runs from September 2014 through September 2015 – and will supposedly fall exactly on four major Hebrew festivals.

Where and what time can it be seen?

Tonight’s celestial show can be watched by sky-gazers in the Americas and Asia.

The full eclipse will begin at 3.25am Pacific Daylight Time (6.25pm Singapore time) and will continue for about an hour.

Recent blood moon occurrences in Singapore

In 2007, Singapore caught only the tail end of a blood moon, although people from places such as the United States, South America and Australia witnessed it in its full glory.

In 2011, some 700 people gathered at the Singapore Science Centre to watch the eclipse, but overcast skies resulted in a failed sighting.

In April 2014, the first eclipse in the current 2014-2015 tetrad took place, but it was not visible in Singapore. Although the moon during this eclipse had an unusual tinge, this was said to be attributed to atmospheric effects, dust or particles.

Where to view the blood moon in Singapore?

The Astronomical Society of Singapore (Tasos) has organised an observation gathering tonight for the rare total lunar eclipse at Labrador Park, near the Tanjong Berlayer Beacon facing Sentosa.

The start of tonight’s total lunar eclipse phase is estimated to be at 6.25pm, and since Singapore’s moonrise is estimated to be at 6.52pm tonight, the moon is expected to be in total eclipse phase from the time of its rising.

How else can we view it?

Watch a  live stream of tonight’s blood moon by Slooh, a company that connects telescopes with the Internet to provide access to the broader public.

Alternatively, US space agency  Nasa is also providing a live feed  to the event tonight.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

Iceland raises volcano aviation alert again

REYKJAVIK, Iceland  — Iceland’s authorities have raised the aviation warning code for a region close to the subglacial Bardarbunga volcano after a small fissure eruption in the area.

The country’s meteorological agency described the eruption in the Holuhraun lava field, about five kilometers (three miles) north of the vast Dyngjujoekull glacier, as a “very calm lava eruption and can hardly be seen on seismometers.”

Sunday morning’s eruption was the third eruption in the area since Aug. 23. On Friday, a smaller eruption also prompted authorities to briefly raise the aviation warning code to restrict flights around the eruption site.

The Civil Protection Department said all airports remained open.

source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

2 space rocks hours apart point up the danger

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—A space rock even bigger than the meteor that exploded like an atom bomb over Russia could drop out of the sky unannounced at any time and wreak havoc on a city. And Hollywood to the contrary, there isn’t much the world’s scientists and generals can do about it.

But some former astronauts want to give the world a fighting chance.

They’re hopeful Friday’s cosmic coincidence — Earth’s close brush with a 150-foot (46-meter) asteroid, hours after the 49-foot (15-meter) meteor struck in Russia — will draw attention to the dangers lurking in outer space and lead to action, such as better detection and tracking of asteroids.

“After today, a lot of people will be paying attention,” said Rusty Schweickart, who flew on Apollo 9 in 1969, helped establish the planet-protecting B612 Foundation and has been warning NASA for years to put more muscle and money into a heightened asteroid alert.

Earth is menaced all the time by meteors, which are chunks of asteroids or comets that enter Earth’s atmosphere. But many if not most of them are simply too small to detect from afar with the tools now available to astronomers.

The meteor that shattered over the Ural Mountains was estimated to be 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II. It blew out thousands of windows and left more than 1,000 people injured in Chelyabinsk, a city of 1 million. And yet no one saw it coming; it was about the size of a bus.

“This is a tiny asteroid,” said astronomer Paul Chodas, who works in NASA’s Near-Earth Object program in Pasadena, California “It would be very faint and difficult to detect — not impossible, but difficult.”

As for the three-times-longer asteroid that hurtled by Earth later in the day Friday, passing closer to the planet than some communications satellites, astronomers in Spain did not even discover it until a year ago. That would have been too late for pre-emptive action — such as the launch of a deflecting spacecraft — if it had been on a collision course with Earth.

Asteroid 2012 DA14, as it is known, passed harmlessly within 17,150 miles (27,599 kilometers) of Earth, zooming by at 17,400 mph (28,001 kph), or 5 miles (8 kilometers) per second.

Scientists believe there are anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million “near-Earth” asteroids comparable in size to DA14 or bigger out there. But less than 1 percent have actually been spotted. Astronomers have catalogued only 9,600 of them, of which nearly 1,300 are bigger than 0.6 miles (0.97 kilometers).

Earth’s atmosphere gets hit with 100 tons of junk every day, most of it the size of sand, and most of it burning up before it reaches the ground, according to NASA.

“These fireballs happen about once a day or so, but we just don’t see them because many of them fall over the ocean or in remote areas. This one was an exception,” NASA’s Jim Green, director of planetary science, said of the meteor in Russia.

A 100 to 130-foot (30 to 40-meter) asteroid exploded over Siberia in 1908 and flattened 825 square miles (2,137 square kilometers) of forest, while the rock that is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was a monster 6 miles (9.6 kilometers) across.

The chances of Earth getting hit without warning by one of the big ones are “extremely low, so low that it’s ridiculous. But the smaller ones are quite different,” Schweickart said. He warned: “If we get hit by one of them, it’s most likely we wouldn’t have known anything about it before it hit.”

Chodas said the meteor strike in Russia is “like Mother Nature is showing us what a small one — a tiny one, really — can do.”

All this points up the need for more money for tracking of near-Earth objects, according to Schweickart and the former space shuttle and station astronaut who now heads up the B612 Foundation, Ed Lu.

A few years ago, Schweickart and others recommended NASA launch a $250 million-a-year program to survey asteroids and work up a deflection plan. After 10 years of cataloging, the annual price tag could drop to $75 million, they said.

“Unfortunately, NASA never acted on any of our recommendations,” he lamented. “So the result of it is that instead of having $250 million a year and working on this actively, NASA now has $20 million. … It’s peanuts.”

Congress immediately weighed in on Friday.

“Today’s events are a stark reminder of the need to invest in space science,” said Rep. Lamar Smith, A Republican and chairman of the House science, space and technology committee. He called for a hearing in the coming weeks.

Bill Cooke, head of the Meteoroid Environments Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said the space agency takes asteroid threats seriously and has poured money into looking for ways to better spot them. Annual spending on asteroid-detection at NASA has gone from $4 million a few years ago to $20 million now.

“NASA has recognized that asteroids and meteoroids and orbital debris pose a bigger problem than anybody anticipated decades ago,” Cooke said.

Schweickart’s B612 Foundation — named after the asteroid in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s “Le Petit Prince” — has been unwilling to wait on the sidelines and is putting together a privately funded mission to launch an infrared telescope that would orbit the sun to hunt and track asteroids.

Its need cannot be underestimated, Schweickart warned. Real life is unlike movies such as “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact.” Scientists will need to know 15, 20 or 30 years in advance of a killer rock’s approach to undertake an effective asteroid-deflection campaign, he said, because it would take a long time for the spacecraft to reach the asteroid for a good nudge.

“That’s why we want to find them now,” he said.

As Chodas observed Friday, “It’s like a shooting gallery here.”

source:  http://technology.inquirer.net/23071/2-space-rocks-hours-apart-point-up-the-danger

Cambridge to study technology’s risk to humans

LONDON – Could computers become cleverer than humans and take over the world? Or is that just the stuff of science fiction?

Philosophers and scientists at Britain’s Cambridge University think the question deserves serious study. A proposed Center for the Study of Existential Risk will bring together experts to consider the ways in which super intelligent technology, including artificial intelligence, could “threaten our own existence,” the institution said Sunday.

“In the case of artificial intelligence, it seems a reasonable prediction that some time in this or the next century intelligence will escape from the constraints of biology,” Cambridge philosophy professor Huw Price said.

When that happens, “we’re no longer the smartest things around,” he said, and will risk being at the mercy of “machines that are not malicious, but machines whose interests don’t include us.”

Fears that machines could overtake humans have long been the subject of science fiction — the computer HAL in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” for example, is one of film’s best-known computer threats.

Price acknowledged that many people believe his concerns are far-fetched, but insisted the potential risks are too serious to brush away.

“It tends to be regarded as a flakey concern, but given that we don’t know how serious the risks are, that we don’t know the time scale, dismissing the concerns is dangerous. What we’re trying to do is to push it forward in the respectable scientific community,” he said.

While Price said the exact nature of the risks is difficult to predict, he said that advanced technology could be a threat when computers start to direct resources towards their own goals, at the expense of human concerns like environmental sustainability.


He compared the risk to the way humans have threatened the survival of other animals by spreading across the planet and using up natural resources that other animals depend upon.

Price is co-founding the project together with Cambridge professor of cosmology and astrophysics Martin Rees and Jann Tallinn, one of the founders of the internet phone service Skype.

The university said Sunday the center’s launch is planned next year.

source: technology.inquirer.net