Forumchem - Forum with AI(ALICE BOT & HAL9000) and TTS

Japan"s Maruyama Shigenori, one of the world"s leading geophysicists, is working on a global formula for a new field of study that would include dozens of disciplines collaborating to produce an overall picture of the Earth. As he connects the links from astronomy to life sciences, an
outline emerges of an all-encompassing image of entire planets which
appear as living super-organisms.

Shigenori believes that expanding the
study of life sciences to the core of our world and the depths of outer
space will help us find distant relatives of our own Earth -- planets
that could also sustain life.

Maruyama is creating a new institute called the Center for Bio-Earth Planetology will be launched in 2009 and fully dedicated to creating a new conception of life in space.He wants to find out if the continents will merge again in 250 million years to form a single super-continent; how meteorites change the chemical composition of the Earth; and what the connection is between the temperature of a planet and its magnetic field, which protects plants and animals from being bombarded with cosmic radiation, which in turn influences the rate of mutations and thus the development of new forms of life.

Maruyama is also provoking controversy in the with his new  theory on the lifecycle of the Earth"s crust.

To explain why contintental plates drift on the surface of the Earth"s molten mantle, Maruyama argues that continents actually have life cycles. Old, cold plates on continental fringes sink to “plate graveyards” deep in the Earth’s mantle, and then rise again, creating volcanoes fueled by three-dimensional convection movements deep below the surface.

Maruyama is taking the ideas of continental-drift pioneer Alfred Wegener to a new level. Wegener was a German explorer and meteorologist who believed back in 1912 that the continents roamed about on the surface of the Earth -- an idea that was ridiculed by even his most supportive research colleagues as a "delirious vision" and "the wonderful dream of a great poet." It wasn"t until the 1960s that studies of the ocean floor finally provided irrefutable proof that Wegener had been right after all.

Today, we all know that the continents are enormous plates that drift on the Earth"s red-hot mantle like icebergs on the ocean. Yet to this day, the hypothesis still lacks a logical and convincing foundation. Nobody has been able to explain the actual mechanics behind the motor that drives the drifting and breaking-up of the continental plates.

The inner reaches of the Earth remain shrouded in mystery. Even the surface of has been explored more extensively. Because deep drilling comes to a halt after a maximum of 12 kilometers, the remaining 6,300 kilometers to the center of the Earth remain inaccessible.

In an interview with Der Spiegel, Maruyama gave the answer: "The continental drift that we observe on the surface of the Earth has its counterpart in the Earth"s mantle. Old, cold plates are pushed down into the Earth"s mantle on the continental edges," he explains. "At this point they collect large amounts of iron. You can imagine it as something similar to water condensation."

Weighted down by the iron, the plates sink farther and farther into the hot, molten rock until they reach the inner sanctum of the Earth"s mantle. There, at a depth of 2,900 kilometers, they finally halt their decent and settle into "plate graveyards." This is presumably the outer edge of the earth"s heavy core, where the temperature is 4,000 degrees Celsius (7,200 degrees Fahrenheit).

Maruyama continues: "But the capsized continents don"t simply rest in their plate graveyards forever." Rather, they are about to experience a sudden resurrection. Heat and pressure in the depths trigger chemical processes, causing the plates to deposit their load of heavy elements. Once liberated of this burden, they become lighter than their surroundings, causing them to rise like corks in water. The result: Above the old plate graves, on the floor of the Earth"s molten mantle, a mushroom-shaped upwelling of abnormally hot magma called a mantle plume makes its way toward the surface.

Eventually, the rising flow of molten rock reaches the crystallized crust and cuts through it like a welding torch. Volcanoes form, such as those on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Maruyama says the red hot lava that erupts on the volcanic island comes directly from an old plate cemetery 2,900 kilometers below the surface, where the remains of an ancient continent that broke up some 750 million years ago simmer to the surface. Maruyama"s theory postulates the amazing comeback story of this ancient rock from the deep.

The key ingredient for the chemistry of the Earth"s interior is the same one that determines the weather on the surface: water. The sunken ocean plates have old seawater locked in their mineral structure -- only a few parts per thousand, but enough to drastically change the characteristics of the rock.

Even minute quantities of water in the ex-floor of the ocean can significantly lower its melting point -- and this speeds up its eventual return to the surface. The water helps the rock to lose its load of heavy iron, thereby increasing the buoyancy of this old plate material.

The geophysicist thus paints a three-dimensional picture of the planet Earth where, in addition to the continents drifting on the surface, there is room for "anti-plate tectonics" at the base of the Earth"s mantle. An "anti-crust" deep below reflects to a certain degree events on the surface, with "lakes" and "mountains" and "rivers" of viscous molten rock.

Earthquakes and computing power are the main requirements for researchers looking to piece together an x-ray-like image of the Earth"s interior. The principle is simple enough: When an earthquake strikes, the seismic waves race clear across the Earth"s mantle. It takes a full quarter of an hour for the shockwave to travel from Indonesia to Germany. The duration of this journey reveals a great deal to researchers. The waves are slowed down by viscous and hot regions, like mantle plumes, and accelerated by solid or cold objects.

Earthquakes similar to the one that hit Kobe in 1995 and killed nearly 5,100 Japanese -- are Maruyama"s main source of data. The island nation lies directly on the West Pacific crossroads of three huge plates that ram into each other like cars in a highway pile-up: the Pacific, Australian and Eurasian tectonic plates.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Links:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,druck-531023,00.html

http://www.newser.com/story/17428.html

A new class of black hole, more than 500 times the mass of the Sun, has been discovered by an international team of astronomers 290 million light years from Earth providing a key clue to the formation of supermassive black holes that exist at the centers of all known galaxies in the universe.

Until now, identified black holes have been either super-massive (several million to several billion times the mass of the Sun) in the centre of galaxies, or about the size of a typical star (between three and 20 Solar masses).

The new discovery is the first solid evidence of a new class of medium-sized black holes. The team, led by astrophysicists at the Centre d"Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements in France, detected the new black hole with the European Space Agency"s XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope.

"While it is widely accepted that stellar mass black holes are created during the death throes of massive stars, it is still unknown how super-massive black holes are formed," says the lead author of the paper, Dr Sean Farrell, now based at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester. "One theory is that super-massive black holes may be formed by the merger of a number of intermediate mass black holes. To ratify such a theory, however, you must first prove the existence of intermediate black holes.

"This is the best detection to date of such long sought after intermediate mass black holes. Such a detection is essential. While it is already known that stellar mass black holes are the remnants of massive stars, the formation mechanisms of supermassive black holes are still unknown."

"The identification of HLX-1 is therefore an important step towards a better understanding of the formation of the super-massive black holes that exist at the centre of the Milky Way and other galaxies."

This new source, dubbed HLX-1 (Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1), lies towards the edge of the galaxy ESO 243-49. It is ultra-luminous in X-rays, with a maximum X-ray brightness of approximately 260 million times that of the Sun. Its position indicates that it is not the central engine of the host galaxy.

Posted by Casey Kazan

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Source: University of Leicester

There was a time when you could walk down the street with an index
finger on a spelunking mission, fairly sure the world wouldn"t share a
chuckle over a photo of the act. Thanks to the Street View feature of
Google Maps, Murphy"s Law dictates that this will happen to you.
Tomorrow. The defense? Wear a very large hat.

So I was quite surprised by an article I read in the San
Francisco Chronicle about sensitive Israel security installations being
"jeopardized" by Google Maps. Clearly, issues such as labeling and mass
distribution transcend the origin of these photos. The irony is, most
"top-secret" sites-- in Israel or anywhere else-- tend to be surrounded
by tall fences, German shepherds, and roving bands of guards with very
large machine guns. Shhh! Don"t tell anyone where the Pentagon"s
located.

Granted, it is access that"s an issue-- photographs "where anyone can
get them," as the cliche goes. But John Anyone is looking for topless
sunbathers, not nuclear weapons facilities. As for relationships
between governments regarding one another as hostile (possessing the
motivation, sophistication and resources necessary for actual physical
interaction with these sites), spying from above is old news. Very
old. When the United States" National Security Agency, National
Reconnaissance Office and Naval Research Lab declassified information
about a project called POPPY, we learned that such snooping from above
has been happening since 1962. Even earlier, the U2 spy plane
controversy served as a wake-up call to invest in large tarps... some
47 years ago!

The Chinese seemed to have taken heed-- the Washington Post  having
revealed what appears to be a "submarine tunnel" at the Jianggezhuang
Base on the Yellow Sea. The U.S. and Russia have no doubt already
adopted similar clandestine measures... if none such have been
discovered, that could just mean they"re working!

Gretel Ehrlich"s book, This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland,
includes excerpts from a Japanese film crew"s interview of expatriate
Ikuo Oshima, conducted in 1997. He had a unique perspective on the
subject:

"When I look up at the night sky I see satellites. Now I hear about the
ones that are so strong, they can see a car license... I still get my
food with a harpoon, same as the hunters a thousand years ago. This
makes me wonder what that satellite sees: on one side of the world it
sees Tokyo and on the other side it sees me standing at the ice edge
dressed in polar bear pants and holding a harpoon. What does this make
the satellite feel? Maybe confused and broken."

by Eric Duby

Related Galaxy Posts:

Cryptome -The Google of Secrets
The New, Real "Minority Report": How the U.S. Gov"t Aims to Catch Criminals That Haven’t Yet Committed a Crime
The Rise of the Surveillance Society—“Big Brother” or Common Sense?
Cyber Warfare: What the Pentagon Security Breech Says About the Future
The Manchurian Bot
Motion Tracking - Sci-Fi Meets Real World

links:

www.space.com/news

www.zerosix.wordpress.com

"Blobs" might sound as scientific as an astrologer at a NASCAR rally, but it"s a real astrophysical term - in fact, it"s a giant one.  Blobs are immense clouds of gas -some stretch for tens of thousands of  light years- which failed to form into galaxies and instead glow in the far reaches of space where stars used to be made.  Now scientists say they"ve found the power source pumping that glow - black holes.

What everyone knows about black holes can be misleading: the definition of a black hole is the event horizon, a boundary beyond which nothing - not even light - can escape.  But that doesn"t mean that nothing comes out of black holes, just that they can"t come back once they pass a very specific boundary.  Black holes actually emit immense amounts of radiation (it"s just that none of it comes from inside the event horizon).  As the black hole hoovers up material, the mass spirals in towards the black hole.  As it falls it"s accelerated and heats up (imagine a rock falling to Earth), and hot material starts to glow.  Very hot material radiates even more energy, "glowing" all the way up to X-rays.

Observations with NASA"s Chandra X-ray observatory have found black holes in several blobs about eleven billion light years from Earth, at the very edge of the system"s detection ability.  They can"t quite make out the other blobs yet, but they believe that every blob has a black hole core - just as galaxies do - which powers their radiation even as it eats their matter.

In fact, it"s these black holes that prevents the blobs from every becoming anything else.  Such a vast cloud of matter would inevitably collapse to start creating stars unless there"s something working to prop it up against gravity - the radiation from a billion-sun-sized black hole.  Which is enough to do most things.

Astronomers recently discovered a mysterious
object known as Lyman-Alpha blobs - huge bodies of gas that may be
precursors to galaxies.The blob, named Himiko for a legendary,
mysterious Japanese queen, stretches for 55 thousand light years, a
record for that early point in time. Himiko is located at a transition
point in the evolution of the
universe called the re-ionization epoch—it"s as far back as we can see
to date.

Luke McKinney

Black Holes Fueling The Blobs http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/science/space/07blob.html?ref=science

Where in our Solar System do you expect life will be found? Jupiter"s Europa, the hidden oceans of Saturn"s moons Enceladus or Titan, the subterranean lakes of Mars, the clouds of Venus?

What will form will the life mostly be? Carbon-based, non-carbon? Microbial? Possibly advanced?

Post your thoughts in Comments and we"ll publish the results next Monday, July 27th.

"One lifeform"s deadly radiation may be another lifeform"s lunch."

David Grinspoon, member of the science team for NASA"s Mars rover, and interdisciplinary scientist for the European Space Agency"s Venus Express mission.

Prominent astrobiologists have warned that we humans may be
blinded by our familiarity with carbon and Earth-like conditions. In
other words, what we’re looking for may not even lie in our version of
a “sweet spot”. After all, even here on Earth, one species “sweet spot”
is another species worst nightmare. In any case, it is not beyond the
realm of feasibility that our first encounter with extraterrestrial
life will not be a solely carbon-based occasion.

Alternative
biochemists speculate that there are several atoms and solvents that
could potentially spawn life. Because carbon has worked for the
conditions on Earth, we speculate that the same must be true throughout
the universe. In reality, there are many elements that could
potentially do the trick. Even counter-intuitive elements such as
arsenic may be capable of supporting life under the right conditions.
Even on Earth some marine algae incorporate arsenic into complex
organic molecules such as arsenosugars and arsenobetaines. Several
other small life forms use arsenic to generate energy and facilitate
growth. Chlorine and sulfur are also possible elemental replacements
for carbon. Sulfur is capably of forming long-chain molecules like
carbon. Some terrestrial bacteria have already been discovered to
survive on sulfur rather than oxygen, by reducing sulfur to hydrogen
sulfide.

Nitrogen and phosphorus could also potentially form
biochemical molecules. Phosphorus is similar to carbon in that it can
form long chain molecules on its own, which would conceivably allow for
formation of complex macromolecules. When combined with nitrogen, it
can create quite a wide range of molecules, including rings.

So
what about water? Isn’t at least water essential to life? Not
necessarily. Ammonia, for example, has many of the same properties as
water. An ammonia or ammonia-water mixture stays liquid at much colder
temperatures than plain water. Such biochemistries may exist outside
the conventional water-based "habitability zone". One example of such a
location would be right here in our own solar system on Saturn"s
largest moon Titan.

Hydrogen fluoride methanol, hydrogen
sulfide, hydrogen chloride, and formamide have all been suggested as
suitable solvents that could theoretically support alternative
biochemistry. All of these “water replacements” have pros and cons when
considered in our terrestrial environment.

What needs to be considered
is that with a radically different environment, comes radically
different reactions. Water and carbon might be the very last things
capable of supporting life in some extreme planetary conditions.

Join in the Poll...Enjoy the comments! Add your thoughts.

Our Thanks, The Daily Galaxy Editorial Team

Some scientists are saying that warp drive
might be possible after all.  Yes, it"s obvious pandering to the new Star
Trek, but be fair: these guys are career physicists.  Star Trek
was theirs to begin with, and now it"s cool we should at least give
them press.  Especially when they want to talk about awesome things
like faster than light travel.

If you"ve seen The Core then you that the
only thing between us and instant space-death is a magnetic field.  You
also know that"s the only thing that"s even heard of real science in
the entire movie, but it"s a pretty important one - and could explain
why the otherwise eminently habitable Mars is such a barren wasteland. 
Scientists think the Martian magnetic field might have been hammered
into submission by strikes from space. (The image above shows the the Syria,
Sinai, and Solis Planum impact areas).

Planetary magnetic fields are created by massive molten metal
currents within the planet"s core.  A flowing current creates a
magnetic field, even when the current is massive volumes of charged
liquid metal moving under the influence of temperature gradients
(convection) - in fact, especially then.  But magnetic analysis of
Martian sites by Berkeley researchers show that the red planet"s
protective field was switched off half a billion years ago, and now
some scientists say they know why.

John Hopkins University
scientists have calculated that a period of massive asteroid impacts,
known to have happened around the same time, could not only have
massively impacted on the surface Deep Impact-style (with all the
atmospheric alteration and great-big-crater-making that entails) but
added enough energy to the planet to heat up the outer layers of the
planet.

Without the huge temperature difference between the core
and mantle, the mega-magnetic dynamo convection currents would be
switched off - and unable to start up again when things cooled down. 
Remember, planetary core behavior is still carrying on from when the
planets first formed - as far as they"re concerned the whole "crust"
thing and all life as we know it is just a cooling scum on the
surface.  If you break something from back then you just don"t have the
juice to start it up again.

Without the magnetic field Mars is
defenseless against the radiation that constantly pours in from space
(never mind the Fantastic Four, the only superpower cosmic rays"ll give
you is decomposition).  Earth is thought to have survived the same
space-bombing because of our superior size, with our dynamo maybe
stuttering a little but - very importantly - not stopping.

As you can maybe tell by the fact you exist.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

Did Mars" Magnetic Field End With A Bang Or A Whimper?

"Everyone has assumed we age by rust. But how do you explain animals
that don"t age? Some tortoises lay eggs at the age of 100, there are
whales that live to be 200 and clams that make it past 400 years."

Stuart Kim, PhD, Stanford University professor of developmental biology and genetics

“We were really surprised,” said Stuart Kim, who is the senior author of the research.

Kim’s lab examined the regulation of aging in C. elegans, a
millimeter-long nematode worm whose simple body and small number of
genes make it a useful tool for biologists. The worms age rapidly:
their maximum life span is about two weeks.

Comparing young worms to old worms, Kim’s team discovered
age-related shifts in levels of three transcription factors, the
molecular switches that turn genes on and off. These shifts trigger
genetic pathways that transform young worms into social security
candidates.

The question of what causes aging has spawned competing schools,
with one side claiming that inborn genetic programs make organisms grow
old. This theory has had trouble gaining traction because it implies
that aging evolved, that natural selection pushed older organisms down
a path of deterioration. However, natural selection works by favoring
genes that help organisms produce lots of offspring. After reproduction
ends, genes are beyond natural selection’s reach, so scientists argued
that aging couldn’t be genetically programmed.

The alternate, competing theory holds that aging is an inevitable
consequence of accumulated wear and tear: toxins, free-radical
molecules, DNA-damaging radiation, disease and stress ravage the body
to the point it can’t rebound. So far, this theory has dominated aging
research.

But the Stanford team’s findings told a different story. “Our data
just didn’t fit the current model of damage accumulation, and so we had
to consider the alternative model of developmental drift,” Kim said.

The scientists used microarrays—silicon chips that detect changes in
gene expression—to hunt for genes that were turned on differently in
young and old worms. They found hundreds of age-regulated genes
switched on and off by a single transcription factor called elt-3,
which becomes more abundant with age. Two other transcription factors
that regulate elt-3 also changed with age.

To see whether these signal molecules were part of a wear-and-tear
aging mechanism, the researchers exposed worms to stresses thought to
cause aging, such as heat (a known stressor for nematode worms),
free-radical oxidation, radiation and disease. But none of the
stressors affected the genes that make the worms get old.

So it looked as though worm aging wasn’t a storm of chemical damage.
Instead, Kim said, key regulatory pathways optimized for youth have
drifted off track in older animals. Natural selection can’t fix
problems that arise late in the animals’ life spans, so the genetic
pathways for aging become entrenched by mistake. Kim’s team refers to
this slide as “developmental drift.”

“We found a normal developmental program that works in young
animals, but becomes unbalanced as the worm gets older,” he said. “It
accounts for the lion’s share of molecular differences between young
and old worms.”

Kim can’t say for sure whether the same process of drift happens in
humans, but said scientists can begin searching for this new aging
mechanism now that it has been discovered in a model organism. And he
said developmental drift makes a lot of sense as a reason why creatures
get old.

“Everyone has assumed we age by rust,” Kim said. “But then how do you explain animals that don’t age?”

Some tortoises lay eggs at the age of 100, he points out. There are
whales that live to be 200, and clams that make it past 400. Those
species use the same building blocks for their DNA, proteins and fats
as humans, mice and nematode worms. The chemistry of the wear-and-tear
process, including damage from oxygen free-radicals, should be the same
in all cells, which makes it hard to explain why species have
dramatically different life spans.

“A free radical doesn’t care if it’s in a human cell or a worm cell,” Kim said.

If aging is not a cost of unavoidable chemistry but is instead
driven by changes in regulatory genes, the aging process may not be
inevitable. It is at least theoretically possible to slow down or stop
developmental drift.

“The take-home message is that aging can be slowed and managed by
manipulating signaling circuits within cells,” said Marc Tatar, PhD, a
professor of biology and medicine at Brown University who was not
involved in the research. “This is a new and potentially powerful
circuit that has just been discovered for doing that.”

Kim added, “It’s a new way to think about how to slow the aging process.”

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Related Galaxy posts:

Homo Sapiens -The "Time Travelers" -A Galaxy Classic
“Hyper-Speed” Evolution Discovered
Bringing Ancient Human Viruses Back to Life: A Jurassic Park or Salvation?
Robot Evolution: A Parallel to the Origins of Life
Virtual Immortality -How To Live Forever
What do Robots Dream of?
Scientists Create Artificial Brain
A Post-Human Future: Are Humans the Limit of Evolutionary Complexity?


Adapted from the following source:

http://med.stanford.edu/news_releases/2008/july/aging-worm.html

Philosophy is a vital study for the human
race - from the ancient Greeks to the modern day, some of the finest
thinkers have examined the human condition and produced valuable
insights and conclusions on what it means "to be."  Unfortunately much
of the other work in the field is dubious, including a recent paper
which argues that we"re all living in a vast computer simulation.  Yes,
it WAS written after the first Matrix film but before the sequels. 
Funny that.

Don"t
miss this re-enactment of the presentation and public reactions to the
original Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds, performed
as a Halloween special on October 30, 1938. The live broadcast
was set in Grover"s Mill, an
unincorporated village in West Windsor Township, New Jersey frightening many listeners into believing that an actual Martian
invasion was in progress.

The
first two thirds of the radio program H. G. Wells" novel is about an alien invasion of Earth was broadcast as a series
of simulated news bulletins, led millions ofnbsp; listeners to believe that an
actual alien invasion was in progress. The fact that the program was commercial free added to the dramatic effect. In the days following the
adaptation, there was widespread outrage in the press and public forums. The episode launched Orson Welles to
fame. Welles used recordings of Herbert
Morrison"s radio reports of the Hindenburg disaster to coach actor Frank
Readick and the rest of the cast, to create the mood he wanted.

Roughly
two thirds of the 55 1/2 minute play was a contemporary retelling of
events of H.G. Well"s novel presented as news bulletins in documentary style.
This approach was originally used by Fr. Ronald Knox for his satirical "newscast" of a
riot overtaking London over the British Broadcasting Company in 1926

Posted by Casey Kazan.