Author: Discover Main Feed

My latest Science Progress blog post looks at the case of a recent Science paper that has had a dramatic impact on the debate over so-called “MTR”–an extremely destructive and invasive form of mining that literally takes the caps off of mountain peaks to access the coal inside them. In essence, it’s the story of scientists being willing to stand up and say what they think about policy, and having a real influence as a result–a case study in how to make scientific information have its maximal impact. An excerpt:

To me, the most intriguing question is this: How did the 12 environmental scientists on the Science paper managed to achieve such an impact? Did they plan for it, or was it just fortuitous?

So I called up Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the article’s lead author. I was something like her 30^th media interview on the topic, but unlike other journalists, I didn’t want to ask about either the policy or the science of MTR. Rather, I inquired about the communication strategy that had been employed to disseminate news about her paper. And thus unfolded a striking story of a group of scientists, with extremely important research on their hands, doing everything pretty much right to ensure its maximal impact.

As Palmer explained, the project out started as pure science. Her team of researchers began by synthesizing a wide array of data from different scientific fields on the consequences of MTR, in a more thorough way than had ever been done before—a process that consumed many months in the peer review process. But as the truly alarming results started to manifest, members of the scientists’ group soon coalesced around a strong, unanimous position about what they were finding. “Rather than just reporting the science,” says Palmer, “we all agreed that the consequences were so huge, we were very comfortable saying, ‘This just has to stop.’”

Resolved upon its message, the team then sought to disseminate it….

To hear more of the story, you can read the full post here.

A polymorphism of the ability to smell urinary metabolites of asparagus.

Face it: your pee smells after you eat asparagus. (And if you think yours doesn’t, it’s because you can’t smell it.) This phenomenon (which is caused by various malodorous sulfur-containing compounds) has tickled the fancies of many researchers, as well as such luminaries as Proust, who wrote of asparagus: “exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, and whose precious essence when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting like a fairy-play by Shakespeare) at transforming my chamber pot into a vase of aromatic perfume (translated from Du côté de chez Swann, Gallimard, 1988, I, 119; I, 131).

But our favorite allusion to the asparagus-pee phenomenon has to be from Benjamin Franklin, who, in 1871 1781, wrote a letter asking researchers to come up with a solution to fart smells (the letter is definitely worth reading in full: To the Royal Academy of Farting):

“Certain it is also that we have the Power of changing by slight Means the Smell of another Discharge, that of our Water. A few Stems of Asparagus eaten, shall give our Urine a disagreable Odour; and a Pill of Turpentine no bigger than a Pea, shall bestow on it the pleasing Smell of Violets. And why should it be thought more impossible in Nature, to find Means of making a Perfume of our Wind than of our Water?”

So, now that we understand why our pee stinks when we eat asparagus, can we address Benjamin’s larger concern? Check back tomorrow for some cutting-edge research on fart-smell-reduction!

A small (10 meter wide) asteroid will pass by the Earth Wednesday, at 12:47 UT. This tiny rock, called 2010 AL30, will pass us at a safe distance of 130,000 km (80,000 miles). As cosmic encounters go, this is a hair’s breadth, but in human terms it’s a long way off; as this graphic makes clear. It’s about a third of the way to the Moon.

2010 AL30 was only discovered on Monday. It’s escaped our previous notice because it’s dinky. Even when it passes you’ll need a telescope to see it. There has been some speculation that this was a man-made object like a rocket booster, since it’s about the right size, and sometimes near-Earth objects turn out to be space junk. But in this case the orbit doesn’t really match any rocket trajectory, so it’s probably a natural rock.

And since I know someone would ask, if this were aimed at us, it would probably explode high up in the atmosphere and not hit the ground. It would be quite a show, but most likely wouldn’t do any damage on the ground (even if it were iron, at that size it’s unlikely it would make it to the ground, and instead would tear itself to pieces on the way in).

And one last thing: note what I titled this post. Now look around the web to see how other articles are titled. Just sayin’.

Tip o’ the Whipple Shield to Mike Murray for putting that graphic together and letting me know about it.

Very rare, but fascinating.

What if we could outsource the manufacturing process to the very things we’re manufacturing? That’s the tantalizing promise of self-assembling systems, in which scientists use the laws of nature to get components to organize themselves into, say, a computer chip. Or in this case, a solar panel. Researchers have announced the creation of self-assembling solar cells that rely on the a principle known to everyone who’s ever made a vinaigrette salad dressing: that oil and water don’t mix.

The researchers’ efforts to made a self-assembling solar panel had been unsuccessful for years, because the components were just the wrong size. Above a certain size it’s possible to use gravity to drive self-organization; on the nanoscale it’s possible to use chemical processes, like the base pairing of DNA, to drive the assembly process. That leaves an awkward range of devices on the micrometer scale in between that aren’t heavy enough for gravity to drive assembly, but too big to be pushed around by substances like DNA [Ars Technica].

To get around this problem, the researchers designed a kind of conveyor belt. They made a solar cell substrate with regular depressions lined with low-temperature solder, which were designed to receive the individual solar cell elements. Each element had gold on one side and silicon on the other. The silicon side was painted with a hydrophobic molecule that is repelled by water, and was painted the gold side with a hydrophilic, or “water-loving,” molecule. When the elements were dumped into a vial containing oil and water, the elements neatly lined up in a row at the boundary between the two liquids. Each element had its gold side pointed towards the water.

In the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers describe how the solar cell took over the work from there. The conveyor belt process is to simply dunk the [substrate] through the boundary and draw it back slowly; the sheet of elements rides up along behind it, each one popping neatly into place as the solder attracts its gold contact. The team made a working device comprising 64,000 elements in just three minutes…. The method tackles what [experts say] is the most challenging problem – the proper alignment of thousands of parts, each thinner than a human hair [BBC News].

Related Content:
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80beats: “DNA Origami” May Allow Chip Makers to Keep Up With Moore’s Law
Discoblog: Self-Organizing Nanotech Could Store 250 DVDs on One Coin-Sized Surface
DISCOVER: Viruses Are Put to Work Building Superbatteries
DISCOVER: Emerging Technology explains that the future belongs to shape-shifting robots

Image: PNAS / Robert J. Knuesel and Heiko O. Jacobs

There’s nothing like the launching a company from your college dorm room that achieves global Internet hegemony within a few years to make you think you can offer royal pronouncements about how the world has changed.

OK, so that was a bit melodramatic. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg earned some howls and guffaws in the last few days over his statements saying that, in a nutshell, people aren’t terribly interested in privacy anymore. Specifically, he said:

“In the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that’s evolved over time.”

Some have interpreted his comments as an indication that he thinks that privacy is over and that the depth of privacy you might have expected, say, five years ago is very different to that you should expect today [BBC News]. The privacy changes that Facebook recently made—changes that ruffled plenty of feathers—seem to be in line with Zuckerberg’s statement. From last December onwards, all Facebook users’ status updates are made publicly available unless the user actively opts to change the settings and make [it] private. Users were alerted to changes via a ‘Notification’ posted in the bottom right hand corner of the site [The Telegraph].

The self-serving element of Zuckerberg’s statements wasn’t lost on some commenters, either. The more information that Facebook users share, the more information Facebook can vacuum into whatever ad-based revenue stream they’re debuting this quarter [The Atlantic].

Not everyone, though, was mocking the baby-faced CEO. Social networking is, by nature, anything but private. The fact is that if Facebook restricted and controlled the sharing of data the way some privacy groups would like, it wouldn’t really be a social networking site and it wouldn’t have over 350 million users willingly sharing information with each other. Joining a “social” networking site and then complaining that your information is being shared is like buying an ice cream sundae and complaining that it’s cold [PC World].

And as TechCrunch points out, credit-rating agencies have been making money by gathering an enormous database of personal information since long before Facebook existed. “Honestly, a picture of you taking a bong hit in college is mice nuts compared to the mountain of data that is gathered and exploited about every single one of us every single day. You just don’t really see that other stuff because those companies don’t like to talk about the data their gathering” [TechCrunch].

Related Content:
80beats: Facebook and Myspace Kick Out Thousands of NY Sex Offenders
80beats: Bankrupt Spam King Is Ordered To Pay Facebook $711 Million
Discoblog: Stole a Piece of the Internets? Prepare to Be Arrested.
Discoblog: Are Happy Facebook Pics Proof That You Aren’t Depressed?

Image: flickr / benstein

One year. 365 parasites. Be a part of it.

I’ve been bad: I haven’t linked to the Carnival of Space for two weeks, so now you get two for the post of one! Carnival #135 is at Steve’s AstroCorner, and 136 is at Simostronomy. Go there, and spend a few hours reading up on the latest in the astronomy blogospherule!

Because there’s no point in building a nanoscopic car that couldn’t crush other nanoscopic cars in a race, Rice University scientists have rolled out their best and baddest “nanodragster” ever. The car, 1/25,000th the size of a human hair, not only has a freely moving chassis but also can turn when one of its wheels is up in the air.

James Tour and his team previously made tiny cars that used carbon-60 molecules called “buckyballs” as wheels, but those wheels could turn on only hot surfaces, about 200 degrees Celsius. No longer. From Futurity.org:

The key to making nanodragsters, Tour says, was putting p-carborane wheels in the front and buckyballs in the back, getting the advantages of both. The front wheels roll easier, while the buckyballs grip the gold roadway well enough to be imaged by Kevin Kelly, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. And the vehicle operates at a much lower temperature than previous nanovehicles.

“The trick to making these nanocars was to attach the smaller wheels first, then deactivate their reactive ends through carbon group attachments that we called ’scythes,’ much like blades on the centers of classical chariot wheels,” Tour says. “Then we could affix the larger C60 wheels to the rear axle.”

No word yet whether any potential nano-races will allow dragsters to gouge each other with those scythes, a la Ben-Hur.

Related Content:
Discoblog: Got Too Many Plastic Bags? Recycle Them Into Carbon Nanotubes
Discoblog: Protect Your Phone with Shock-Absorbing Nanotubes
80beats: Nanoscale Origami: A Box—with Lock & Key—Made Entirely of DNA

Image: Rice University

If you go outside around midnight tonight and look to the south (north for you standing-on-your-head southern hemispherites), it’ll be hard to miss Orion standing tall over the horizon. If you look at the star at the upper left, marking his right arm, you might note that it glows a ruddy orange-red. That star is the famous Betelgeuse, one of the brightest in the night sky.

But your view of it probably isn’t as good as that of some French astronomers who got this awesome shot of Betelgeuse:

Cooool. Literally. Betelegeuse is a red supergiant, a massive star nearing the end of its life; in a few millennia (or a few hundred) it’ll explode as a supernova. But for now it’s a swollen monster, cooler than the Sun, but intrinsically a lot more luminous because, simply, there’s so much of it.

Even with our most powerful telescopes, most normal stars would be an unresolved dot at a distance of 640 light years. But because Betelgeuse is so frakkin’ big, we can resolve using a technique called interferometry. This uses several different telescopes to collect light and adds them together in a way such that extremely small objects — well, apparently small, that is — can be resolved.

At its mind-numbing distance of nearly 4 quadrillion kilometers (2.4 quadrillion miles), mighty Betelegeuse is diminished to a mere 0.045 arcseconds across. To give you an idea of how small this is, the full Moon is about 1800 arcseconds across in the sky. An arcsecond is 1/3600th of a degree, and Betelgeuse is a tiny fraction of even that. Hubble’s resolution is about 0.1 arcseconds, so Betelgeuse is unresolved even using that famous ’scope (though using some fancy tricks some features on the star can be seen using Hubble).

Obviously, interferometry is a powerful method for looking at big stars! Using it, the astronomers were able to see two large, bright features on the surface of Betelgeuse, most likely convection spots, where hot gas is bubbling up from the star’s interior. The bigger of the two spots is about 500 K hotter than the rest of the 3600 K surface, and accounts for about 8.5% of all the light the star emits! The other is smaller and unresolved, and contributes about 5% of the light.

Mind you, the bigger of the two hot spots really is ginormous: it’s bigger than the distance of the Earth from the Sun!

Did I mention Betelegeuse is frakkin’ huge?

Techniques like this reveal a huge amount of information on objects that are otherwise far too small in apparent size to measure. We already knew Betelgeuse is a dynamic star — it changes its brightness over time, for example — but this particular image shows us the scale of the changes on the star’s surface, which can lead to models of how its interior behaves, which in turn will help us understand how supergiant stars live out their lives and eventually explode. At 640 light years away, Betelgeuse can’t hurt us when it goes supernova, but it’ll be an amazing light show… and the more we know about it, the better.

Once, most of exoplanets that astronomers spotted were giants, but now they’re seeing more and more new planets with masses not far off from the Earth’s. One of those newly found Earth-like exoplanets, however, may not have always been so similar to our own world: An astronomer made the case last week that the small, sweltering planet was once a mighty gas giant that shrank.

Astronomers discovered Corot-7b in September. Its diameter is roughly 1.7 times that of Earth. Based on its size and mass, its density is similar to Earth’s, indicating that it is a rocky Earth-like orb [ABC News]. But the comparisons end there. While it’s rocky like Earth, this fiery hellhole is no place for life. It orbits its star at a distance of only 1.6 million miles (we’re presently at a much more comfortable 93 million miles from our sun) and completes a revolution in only 20 hours’ time. And, NASA’s Brian Jackson argued at last week’s American Astronomical Society meeting, Corot-7b is probably just a shell of its former self, and once was a type of gas giant called a “hot Jupiter.”

Given the planet’s proximity to its star, Jackson says it would be subject to a constant blast of heat that robs it of its mass. Rock vaporized by the extreme temperatures could escape the atmosphere of Corot-7b, and the planet would’ve steadily lost mass as it moved closer to its star. It could be shedding half an Earth mass every billion years. Extrapolating backward in time, Jackson concludes that the planet may have started as a gas-giant world more akin to Jupiter or Saturn, and that its light elements were driven off [Sky & Telescope]. The gas giant case isn’t clinched; one could also argue that the planet was always rock, and just slowly lost mass over the years. Either way “this planet is disappearing before our eyes,” Dr. Jackson said in a statement [ABC News].

Elsewhere at the AAS meeting, astronomers announced a new find: the second-smallest exoplanet ever, given a mouthful of a moniker in HD156668b. The team of astronomers who discovered HD156668b used one of two Keck telescopes at the 4,145-meter (13,600-foot) summit of Mount Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The astronomers used the so-called wobble method, which measures the gravitational effects of a planet on its star [AFP]. This new world is some 80 light-years away in the Hercules constellation. It’s only four times more massive than Earth.

With the exoplanet tally now well past 400, and the planet-hunting Kepler telescope starting to spot its first distant orbs, expect the announcements to keep coming. Maybe soon we’ll even find an Earth-like world that isn’t unbelievably sizzling hot.

Related Content:
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80beats: Kepler Telescope Spies Its First 5 Exoplanets, Including “Styrofoam” World
80beats: Meet the New Neighbors: Earth-Like Worlds Orbiting Nearby Stars
DISCOVER: How Long Until We Find a Second Earth?
DISCOVER: Big Picture: The Inspiring Boom in “Super-Earths”

Image: ESO. Artist’s impression of COROT-7b.

As promised, we’re going to have a book club to talk about From Eternity to Here. Roughly speaking, every Tuesday I’ll post about another chapter, and we’ll talk about it. Easy enough, right? (Chapters 4 and 5, about relativity, are pretty short and will be combined into one week.)

For the most part I won’t be summarizing each chapter — because you’ll all have read the book, so that would be boring. Instead, I want to give some behind-the-scenes insight about what was going through my mind when I put each chapter together — a little exclusive for readers of the blog. Of course, in the comments I hope we can discuss the substance of the chapters in as much detail as we like. I’m going to try to participate actively in all the discussions, so I hope to answer questions when I can — and certainly expect to learn something myself along the way.

The book is divided into four parts: an overview, spacetime and relativity, entropy and the Second Law, and a discussion of how it all fits into cosmology. You can find a more detailed table of contents here, and here is the prologue to get you in the mood. Part Three is definitely the high point of the book, so be sure to stick around for that.

So see you next Tuesday! Get reading!

Part One: Overview

• January 19: Chapter One (What is time?)
• January 26: Chapter Two (Entropy and the Second Law)
• February 2: Chapter Three (The expanding universe)

Part Two: Relativity

• February 9: Chapters Four and Five (Special and general relativity)
• February 16: Chapter Six (Time travel)

Part Three: Entropy and the Arrow of Time

• February 23: Chapter Seven (Determinism and reversibility)
• March 2: Chapter Eight (Entropy according to Boltzmann)
• March 9: Chapter Nine (Information, memory, life…)
• March 16: Chapter Ten (Recurrence and Boltzmann brains)
• March 23: Chapter Eleven (Quantum mechanics)

Part Four: Time and the Universe

• March 30: Chapter Twelve (Black holes)
• April 6: Chapter Thirteen (Evolution of the universe)
• April 13: Chapter Fourteen (Inflation)
• April 20: Chapter Fifteen and Epilogue (Explaining the arrow of time)

Joe Romm has an important post about the folks down in Texas who are constantly trying to bring the textbooks into line with ideology. This is something we usually think of as affecting the evolution issue, but no–climate change is also a topic that is being watched closely by the watchers of educational content.

Romm himself is linking a Washington Monthly piece called “Revisionaries,” which reports the following:

A similar scenario played out during the battle over science standards, which reached a crescendo in early 2009. Despite the overwhelming consensus among scientists that climate change exists, the group rammed through a last-minute amendment requiring students to “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming.” This, in essence, mandates the teaching of climate-change denial. What’s more, they scrubbed the standards of any reference to the fact that the universe is roughly fourteen billion years old, because this timeline conflicts with biblical accounts of creation.

The strategy is identical, isn’t it? “Critically analyze” evolution, “critically analyze” climate change…and smuggle bad science into the classroom to sow doubt and confuse the kids. Frankly, I am wondering these days if climate denial may not be growing into an even more massive phenomenon than evolution denial in the US. I doubt it has the potential to be as long-lived. But the intensity of it, which I feel every day now, simply dwarfs what’s going on in the evolution fight….

If you thought George Clooney’s character in “Up in the Air” racked up a lot of frequent flyer miles, you should meet his avian rival, which flies the equivalent of three round trips to the moon and back during its lifespan. For a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers tracked the arduous migration of the tiny Arctic tern and found that it flies an average of 44,000 miles every year on its trip from Greenland to Antarctica and back. That’s a new world record.

Scientists suspected that this tern could best the previous world record of 39,000-mile migrations by the sooty shearwater, though they previously lacked tracking devices small enough for the bird to carry. But the team used a tiny tracker developed by the British Antarctic Survey, which weighs just a twentieth of an ounce (1.4 grams)—light enough for an Arctic tern to carry on a band around its leg [National Geographic]. This device reported the birds’ position twice daily.

The locating devices reported back a few surprises. It turns out that the birds did not immediately travel south, but spent almost a month at sea in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. The researchers believe the birds use this lengthy stop-over as a chance to “fuel-up” with food before continuing on to less fruitful waters farther south [LiveScience]. In addition, the birds don’t fly a direct path from Greenland to Antarctica and back, but zigzag across the Atlantic Ocean—the map’s yellow lines show the terns jogging between Africa and South America on their northward journey in the spring.

These diversions took advantage of prevailing global wind systems to help the birds preserve energy, according to Carsten Egevang, from the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources [The Independent]. They also roughly double the distance that terns must fly, earning them this new record.

Not all tern migrations are created equal: The shortest in the study measured about 36,000 miles, the longest about 50,000. All in all, it adds up to a well-traveled lifetime. Terns can live on the long side of 30 years, and flying 44,000 miles every year for that length of time can add up to about 1.5 million miles, or about three lunar round trips.

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: Works in Progress: How do migrating birds know where to go?

Image: Carsten Egevang

Speaking of ice on Mars, the folks with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter made a cool video talking about new low-latitude craters exposing water ice beneath the Martian surface:

You can watch more HiRISE videos at the MRO video gallery. Lots of cool stuff there!

Related posts:
Mars is Sublime
Water on the Moon…? Yup. It’s real.

Tip o’ the dry ice crater to the HiRISE Twitter feed.

Please allow us to introduce ourselves…

We’re two PhD students in Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley. Back in March of aught-nine, we started a little blog called “NCBI ROFL” in which we posted real scientific articles with funny subjects from the PubMed database (which is housed by the National Center for Biotechnology information, aka NCBI).

Initially, our fans were mostly grad students. But over time, our following grew, and now we are happy to be joining the Discoblog family. If you’re not familiar with us, here are a few of our most-loved posts:

Accidental condom inhalation.

Does garlic protect against vampires? An experimental study.

Finding the frequency of Fido’s farts.

Harry Potter and the curse of headache.

A woman’s history of vaginal orgasm is discernible from her walk.

Hungry for more? Explore our post archives. And for even more info, check out or FAQs.

We’re still accepting submissions! Please email [email protected] with funny articles!

Last week I mentioned participating in a discussion at ScienceOnline ‘10 entitled “Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents” featuring Janet and Isis. But there’s another equally exciting panel I’m part of earlier in the day with Rebecca Skloot and David Dobbs. Here is the description:

Getting the Science Right: — an underappreciated and essential art — and the role scientists can and should (but often don’t) play in it.

Description: Much of the science that goes out to the general public through books, newspapers, blogs and many other sources is not professionally fact checked. As a result, much of the public’s understanding of science is based on factual errors. This discussion will focus on what scientists and journalists can do to fix that problem, and the importance of playing a pro-active role in the process. Discuss here.

After turning in my latest manuscript just one week ago, I have a lot to say on the topic. This should be a terrific session and I encourage readers attending the conference to join us next weekend!

With that, I’m off to day one of Michael Webber’s energy technology and policy course at UTAustin.

In tomorrow’s New York Times, I dig up some of the fossil viruses that have been buried in our genome for tens of millions of years.

This is a subject I’ve explored here on the Loom before (1, 2), but now is a great time to stop and take stock of just how much progress scientists have made in exhuming the ancient invaders that helped make us what we are.

There was one dimension of this research that I didn’t have space to describe, but it’s too cool to let go unmentioned. In the article, I describe a virus protein called syncitin that is essential for placentas to develop. Cells push the protein to their surface, where it lets them latch onto other cells, fusing together to create a special layer through which nutrients can pass from mother to child. The protein got its start on viruses, which use it to latch onto host cells and fuse to them, allowing their genes to slip in.

But recent research has revealed an intriguing new twist to our viral legacy. It turns out that the viral surface protein in question has a second job. It also tamps down the immune system of its host. If the protein is altered to make it unable to suppress the immune response, viruses cannot successfully infect their hosts.

Thierry Heidmann, a leading paleovirologist whom I spoke to for the article, suspects that this second function may have been critical in the evolution of the placenta. That’s because there are two major challenges to being a placental mammal. First off, mothers need to be able supply their embryos with lots of nutrition for a long time through their circulatory system. Second, they have to cool down their immune systems. A baby’s tissues would otherwise look to the mother’s immune system like foreign tissue and be quickly rejected. So it’s possible that viruses not only let mothers feed their babies, but not kill them either.

This is a story that’s just going to get cooler, so expect updates as necessary.

Our reporter tries out a trio of genetic tests to find out what they can tell her about her identity and her ancestry.

Set your watches, apocalypse watchers: On Thursday, the Doomsday Clock—that harbinger of untimely death run by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—will change again.

When the organization debuted its clock in 1947 in the wake of the new dangers of the nuclear age, they set it at “7 minutes to midnight.” From there, the scientists have adjusted the metaphorical apocalypse countdown either up or down in response to geopolitics. The furthest we’ve ever been from our collective end is 12 minutes, after the signings of SALT and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1979 17 minutes, after the end of the Cold War. The closest we’ve gotten is 2 minutes (the namesake of the Iron Maiden song), in response to hydrogen bomb tests.

What now? From Politico:

“The last time the doomsday clock was reset was in 2007, from 7 minutes to five minutes to midnight.

(Director Kennette) Benedict said she would offer no hints about whether the clock would be reset closer or further away from “doomsday” on Thursday. One suspects the group of scientists would be likely to show some appreciation for Barack Obama’s efforts on nonproliferation, climate change, etc. compared to his predecessor.”

This will be the first time you can watch live streaming of the Doomsday clock change, which happens at 10 a.m. EST on Thursday here in New York. I, for one, will not be watching, since we all know the world’s actually going to end in 2012 because of some Central American prophecy.

Related Content:
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80beats: Cutting-Edge Science Reveals: World Won’t End of Dec. 21, 2012
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Image: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists