Scary Yellowstone Supervolcano just got Scarier

Headnote: It's time to announce that our previous post was accurate in its skepticism, no more evidence for alien life has been found.

It has been well known for some years that Yellowstone National park, one of the biggest national tourist attractions in America, is the result of a giant supervolcano. A supervolcano is a type of volcano that, as it's name suggests, dwarfs all others. Supervolcanos build up huge reservoirs of magma over hundreds of thousands of years, then release it all in an enormus supereruption. Supereruptions spread ash over thousands of miles and can plunge the entire earth into a mini-ice age that can last a THOUSAND YEARS! Not only does Yellowstone rest on a supervolcano, but this supervolcano is one of the most powerful ones on earth.
And one more thing.
The eruption.
It's overdue.
The last Yellowstone eruption was 640,000 years ago.
Yellowstone is on a cycle of about 600,000 years between eruptions.

Have I sufficiently scared you yet? Good. Now I can get to the real discovery: It seems that the Yellowstone magma chamber is bigger than previously thought. New studies using electrical conductivity have given us this image



I can't be certain, but I think that red stuff is the magma. All that red stuff. I don't mean to sound alarmist, but this is sort of scary. If this chamber empties during an eruption, you could get much of north america uninhabitable, with millions of deaths. That's right, MILLIONS. Volcanic ash stops vehicle engines, and worse, chokes people to death. The ash enters your lungs and reacts with the moisture inside, creating a cement-like substance, which chokes you to death.
Fortunately, an eruption would almost certain be forecasted by scientists months, if not years, in advance. However, one might wonder what would happen to America if we found out that a supereruption was imminent. The law might break down. People might start rioting. The docks and airways would be full of people, wanting to get out before the supervolcanic apocalypse came.

If you really want to know what would happen if a supereruption occurred, try the BBC nonfiction movie Supervolcano.
Sources:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20110411/sc_livescience/yellowstonesupervolcanobiggerthanthought
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13061779

Additional Reading:
Supervolcano, a docufiction movie by the BBC and the Discovery Channel
Mystery of the Megaeruption, a PBS Nova episode about supervolcanos, primarily the one under Lake Toba.

Alien Life!? Mabye.

Dr. Richard B. Hoover, a NASA astrobiologist, has come out with a discovery that has the power to shake the world of science - or just make him look stupid. Hoover believes that he has found a small fossil worm in a CI1 carbonaceous chondrite meteorite, a very rare meteorite of which only nine exist on Earth. According to Hoover, he has found small fossils, many resembling life on Earth. He uses this evidence to make a case for his theory that life evolved in space or on other planets.
Many scientests doubt Hoover's claim. According to The Journal of Cosmology, "no other paper in the history of science has undergone such a thorough vetting". However, many scientests are doubting the validity of The Journal of Cosmology. The most aggressive, PZ Meyers, says this in ScienceBlogs:

[The Journal of Cosmology] isn't a real science journal at all, but is the ginned-up website of a small group of crank academics obsessed with the idea of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe that life originated in outer space and simply rained down on Earth.

However, the author has investigated Meyers post in ScienceBlogs (And he invites the reader to see for himself), and has decided that Meyers is a bit to Zealotical and critical, sometimes t the extent of being just plain rude. He says this:

It [The Journal of Cosmology] doesn't exist in print, consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s, and publishes lots of empty noise with no substantial editorial restraint. For a while, it seemed to be entirely the domain of a crackpot named Rhawn Joseph who called himself the emeritus professor of something mysteriously called the Brain Research Laboratory, based in the general neighborhood of Northern California (seriously, that was the address: "Northern California"), and self-published all of his pseudo-scientific "publications" on this web site.

He also calls the people at the Cosmology "single-minded lunatics". Although some would argue that I sometimnes act similarly, I've never called anyone a "lunatic"(Although I'd be happy to describe both Old-Earth and New-Earth creationists using that term and more).

So let's wrap this up: Richard Hoover discovered what may be an alien fossil, but most scientists are skeptical. PZ Meyers attacks this point and uses some very rude language.
So what should we think? Hoover works for NASA, so he shouldn't be treated lightly, but on the whole, I think that TIME magazine says it best: "Scientist Claims to Have Found Evidence of ET, But Don't Phone Home Just Yet"


One thing's for sure: if more develops, you'll read about it here, at the Pokiphlanon Science Blog!


Sources:


Time Magazine: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/07/scientist-claims-to-have-found-evidence-of-et-but-dont-phone-home-just-yet/

Yahoo News: http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/nasascientistfindsevidenceofalienlife

ScienceBlogs: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/03/did_scientists_discover_bacter.php

Sorry for the Absence

We are sorry for our long absence, but we've just found a GREAT article to write about. As the situation develops, we'll be giving it to you right here, on the Pokiphlanon Science Blog!

What's the article about? It's too good a secret to tell right away, but we'll tell you this: It's about out favorite subject: alien life!

Planet of Horrors: Halloween Special

For this Halloween, the Pokiphlanon team has decided to examine the spookiest animals according to pop culture, and then tell you our top ten!

Spooky Pop Culture Critters:

Bats:
Bats are flying mammals, that are not, as popularly believed, related to mice. Nor do they all suck blood. In fact, most bats eat either fruit or insects. Many species of bat actually help control pest insects like mosquitoes! Vampire bats, the blood-sucking bats, are found only in central and south America. Some other central and south american bats eat fish, small vertabrates, and even other bats!

Ravens and Crows:
Although ravens and crows are often thought of as evil harbingers of doom, the facts could not be more different. Ravens and crows are among the smartest of all birds, up with parrots! They are omnivores, and can remember and recognize faces for two years! They can also communicate about this to others! We humans have so much in common with them.

Rats:
Again, we have a smart animal, although not nearly on the scale of the Ravens and Crows. Rats are much more intelligent than their cousins the mice, and can associate shapes with food, and be trained to run mazes, as is well known. Rats are associated with filth for a good reason, they are amazing in their tolorance of filth. Rats can live almost anywhere, assisted by humans. The rasponsibility for the black death had been pinned on rats, but according to many rat-lovers and the Pixar short "Your friend the Rat", the rat flea was actually responsible. I now propose a third explanation: The plague virus caused the plague, but since viruses can undoubtedly not reason, we cannot really "Blame" anyone.

Spiders:
For the first time yet, we have here a creature that often deserves it's reputation as a terror. Although many, including myself, point out the Red-kneed Tarantula, a creature that can be docile and makes a good pet, as an exception. However, although mos spider venom cannot kill humans, many species are lethal. The black widow and Australian Funnel-web spider are among the most lethally venomous spiders on earth. Scientific studies and Mythbusters have shown that the common myth of the Daddy Longlegs spider is false; the spiders fangs can penetrate human skin and the venom is almost totally harmless. However, it is important to remember that most spiders will run before they attack.

Werewolves:
Contrary to popular belief, werewolves are in fact, real! Just Kidding!

Other Scary Critters:

Cone Snail:
Cone Snails may look harmless, but in fact, these small ocean mollusks are in fact deadly. Many have toxic bites that can kill a human.



Stingray:

Stingrays are scary in that they have spines up to a meter long that can cause serious damage to anyone that treads on them. In my opinion, the really scary thing about them is that they are hidden in the sand until it is too late.

Hippopotamus:
Contrary to popular belief, lions are not the most dangerous animals in Africa. Nor are crocodiles. Not leopards either. In fact, the most human deaths in Africa are caused by the malarial mosquito. After that, it's probably the Tsetse fly, the primary carrier of sleeping sickness. However, the most dangerous large animal is the hippopotamus. Hippos can run surprisingly fast, and are highly aggressive. Their huge jaws can bite crocodiles in half, and if you get between a hippo and the water, you're in big trouble. Strangely, hippos occationally behave in a very different manner. A behavior first documented in the PBS|Nature episode Capturing the Killer Croc, hippos will gently lick the hide of a dead animal, in the case in Killer Croc, a cow. They then lay down around the calf, in what has been compared to a funeral rite.
The second most dangerous large animals in Africa are Cape Buffalo.

Thanks for reading, and happy Halloween!

New Earth-Like Planet Outside the Solar System

The news was released around September 29th: Astronomers had found the most Earthlike planet yet. The new exoplanet, meaning a planet outside our solar system, is called Gilese 581g, and may harbor life. Gilese 581g is 3 times the mass of earth, and orbits it's star, Gilese 581, in 37 days. This may seem like a close orbit and a large planet, but jet fighter pilots survive at 3 Gs. (One G is the gravity of earth; 2 Gs is twice the gravity of Earth, not to be confused with grams, which is about the weight of a paper clip.) The orbit of 37 days may seem like a short orbit, implying a close orbit and high temperatures, but Gilese 581 is a red dwarf, and therefore smaller and less bright than our sun. Another oddity is the length of Gilese 581g's day, it lasts forever. Due to what astronomers call "tidal forces" (because they are the same forces that cause the tides), one side of Gilese 581g always faces it's sun. The other side is in permanent darkness. Any life would exist on the band between the two sides. The area between "too close to he star!" and "too far away from the star!" is called the goldilocks zone: not too hot and not too cold. Gilese 581g's orbit is right in the goldilocks zone.

However, one of the most amazing things about Gilese 581g is not its relatively small size or distance to its sun, but its distance to earth. Gilese 581g is only 20 light-years from earth. (Contrary to many people's beliefs, the light-year is actually a unit of measurement, which masures the disance light travels in a year in a vacum.) Although most would consider this a very long way, 20 light-years is an astoundingly short distance in porportion to the size of our galaxy. If humans could develop a space ship that could go half the speed of light, a probe could return results within sixty years, a short time in comparison to the scale of the universe. Not only that, but according to Einstein’s theory if relativity, as speed increases, the time experienced by the object moving decreases! This means that a hypothetical astronaut would be able to make it there within the confines of her/his lifetime!

Although most reading this right now will probably not live to see the results of a mission, it’s something the human race should probably consider, for the sake of our children and to perhaps answer the ultimate question: “Are we alone?”

Sources:

National Geographic

Science News

Cockroach Brains - The New Miracle Drug?

  What would it take to make you take a pill of cockroach brains? Maybe... Getting Sick? A new studies have shown that the brains of the common cockroach contain antibiotics that can kill antibiotic-resistant strains of E. Coli and Staphylococcus aureus (Another harmful bacteria, better known as MRSA). This is how cockroaches and possibly other insects in unsanitary environments survive without getting infected all the time. So would You take the cockroach Rx?

Sources:

National Geographic

Science News

Triceratops - What's going on?

There's been a lot of news lately about Triceratops "never existed". What happened?

Almost everyone knows about Triceratops, with its characteristic three horns. Triceratops, in fact, means "three horned face". What is less well known is that Triceratops also had a larger counterpart, called Torosaurus (Which does not mean 'Bull Lizard'.). Triceratops and Torosaurus lived side by side, in the same place, at the same time. The only major difference, other than a small size difference, was that Triceratops had a solid bone frill, while Torosaurus had two large holes in it's frill (see below).

A recent study at the Museum of the Rockies that involved famous paleontologist Jack Horner has determined that Triceratops was actually a juvenile form of Torosaurus. So Triceratops was real, it was just misidentified. Therefore, a better phrase for this discovery would be "Triceratops was actually a baby Torosaurus.
Interestingly enough, this is not the first time this knd of thing has happened. In one case, different species of Bonehead Dinosaurs, or Pachycephalosaurs, were discovered to be just growth stages of other species of dinosaurs. In another instance, different looking fossil ceratopsians were assumed to be different species until they were found together in a herd (It was determined that these were all forms of Pachyrhinosauraus.).
But the species being abolished isn't Triceratops, it's Torosaurus! In paleontology (and in other forms of biology), the first name given gets priority. This is how Brontosaurus was renamed Apatosaurus: the name Apatosaurus was given first. (Actually, Brontosaurus also had the wrong head...) Since Triceratops was named before Torosaurus, both animals will now be called Triceratops, also saving a lot of confusion. Whew! We dodged a bullet there!

Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/02/triceratops-was-juvenile_n_667475.html,
http://www.mcwetboy.com/mcwetlog/2010/07/triceratops_torosaurus_and_dinosaur_biodiversit.php (For the Picture),
Dinosaurs: The Most Complete, Up-to-Date Encyclopedia for Dinosaur Lovers of All Ages, By Thomas Holtz (A must-read)