Famous Scotland volcano has only one 'heart,' not three
Hundreds of planets are being found
beyond our solar system, including some
that just might be habitable. But can we
ever confirm signs of alien life beyond our
solar system? It's theoretically possible —
but in a new book about exoplanetology,
"Five Billion Years of Solitude," science
journalist Lee Billings suggests that the
task may be beyond humanity's financial
capabilities.
The good news is that this is shaping up
to be a golden age of astronomy — thanks
in part to the Hubble Space Telescope, the
data from the Kepler planet-hunting
telescope, the yet-to-be-launched James
Webb Space Telescope and a host of next-
generation ground-based telescopes that
will be coming online. The prospects have
never been better for finding Earth-size
planets in Earth-type orbits around
sunlike stars.
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However, it's not enough to find those
alien Earths. Those discoveries just open
the way to a bigger question: Does life
exist on those distant worlds?
Sniffing out life
In his book, Billings traces how scientists
have worked out ways to detect life's
signature: For example, you might see an
anomalous abundance of oxygen and
methane in a planet's atmosphere. Or you
might pick up a whiff of gases that are
harder to detect, such as nitrous oxide or
dimethyl sulfide.
Making the case for life on extrasolar
planets would probably require putting
more than one next-generation telescope
into outer space, Penn State geoscientist
James Kasting told Billings.
"For any interesting planets we'd find at
first, there could be a whole series of
follow-up missions done at greater and
greater expense of time and money to nail
down what exactly is being seen," Kasting
said. "It could go on for 50 years, a
century, who knows."
NASA already has committed itself to
following up on the planet quest, with a
$200 million mission known the
Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite , or
TESS, due for launch in 2017 — plus the
$8.8 billion Webb telescope , now
scheduled for a 2018 launch. The quest
will also involve ground-based telescope
projects such as the High Accuracy Radial
Velocity Planet Searcher, the Automated
Planet Finder and the European Extremely
Large Telescope . Will all that be enough?
"I fear it's just going to leave us on the
cusp," Billings told NBC News.
In "Five Billion Years of Solitude," Billings
traces the successes and the setbacks in
the search for life among the stars. He
delves into five decades of ups and downs
in SETI, including the financial challenges
that have dogged the Allen Telescope
Array in California. He analyzes the
reasons why an ambitious mission known
as the Terrestrial Planet Finder fizzled. And
he highlights the hopes that surround
potential future missions — ranging from
the low-cost ExoplanetSat project to a
grand scheme to use the sun as the
gravitational lens for a cosmic-scale
telescope capable of imaging an
exoplanet's expressways.
Follow the money
The problem is finding the money to take
the planet quest to the next level —
especially in an era of tighter budgets,
and in the wake of the cost overruns and
schedule slips that have plagued the James
Webb Space Telescope. Billings wishes
there were extra money to build and
launch a separate starshade for the Webb
telescope, which would help scientists
reduce the glare of alien stars when they
look for planets. But that kind of add-on
just isn't in the budget.
"If I could gather the astronomical
community in a room, I would implore
them to consider the fact that the golden
age of astronomy in which we all live has
no guarantees of continuing," Billings said.
"It's not going to be around forever, and
it depends on the largesse of taxpayers
and the politicians who pull the strings."
The way Billings sees it, finding and
characterizing other Earths should be at
the top of the priority list for space
science — and although it's possible to
draw upon the generosity of billionaire
philanthropists and crowdsourcing
campaigns, it's impossible to pursue the
quest without NASA.
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"If we're going to be dependent on the
largesse of billionaires to answer these
scientific questions, these existential
questions — you gotta wonder, what the
heck is NASA for? Now everyone is trying
to find any way but NASA to do it,"
Billings said. "We aren't going to find alien
Earths and life beyond the solar system
through the fantasies of multibillion-dollar
Kickstarter campaigns. That's a non-
starter."
More about the planet quest:
Astronomers spot lone planet without a
sun
Flash interactive: The search for other
planets
NBC News archive about planets
Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science
editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log
community by "liking" the NBC News
Science Facebook page, following b0yle
on Twitter and adding +Alan Boyle to your
Google+ circles. To keep up with
NBCNews.com's stories about science and
space, sign up for the Tech & Science
newsletter, delivered to your email in-box
every weekday. You can also check
out "The Case for Pluto," my book about
the controversial dwarf planet and the
search for new worlds.
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Discuss 50
Who needs
humans?
Chimps go ape
over sweet-
talking robot
Oct. 16, 2013 at 6:32 PM ET
We lost the cats to the Roombas , and the
dogs to the pointing PeopleBots . Now, it
seems that robots are casting a spell on
curious chimps, too.
When 16 chimps from the Yerkes National
Primate Center in Georgia encountered
Robota, a doll who made pre-recorded
chimp sounds from her chest, they tried
to befriend her and talk to her, and they
even banged on their cages to invite her
to play.
"In one case, a chimp laughed at the
robot while gesturing 'play,'" Marina
Davila-Ross, a psychology lecturer at the
University of Portsmouth and part of the
team who watched the chimps interact
with Robota, wrote in Ars Technica.
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Two chimpanzees, Faye and Jarred,
offered the robot "toys," she writes.
Almost all the chimps tried to
communicate with the bot using gestures
or facial expressions, Davila-Ross and her
co-authors note in a new study in Animal
Cognition .
The chimps were particularly interested
when the bot — to the extent that it could
— mimicked apelike movements. They
were less interested when her movements
seemed more human.
For anyone who's surprised that our
primate relatives seem smitten with a
robotic playmate, remember that we form
bonds with robots, too. Studies have
shown that robotic pets were sometimes
more successful than live ones at
engaging elderly adults .
When it comes to robotic companions,
chimps and humans seem to agree on one
thing: So what if they're not real?
— vi a IEEESpectrum and Ars Technica
Nidhi Subbaraman writes about science
and technology. You can follow her on
Facebook , Twitter and Google+ .
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Ocean health
suffers from
overfishing,
index finds
Oct. 16, 2013 at 6:11 PM ET
The health of the world's oceans are
inextricably linked to human health and
well-being; more than one-third of people
worldwide depend on seafood for 20
percent of their animal protein, according
to the United Nations.
To gauge how well the oceans are doing,
a large team of researchers created a
wide-ranging measure of the oceans'
health. On Tuesday, the second annual
edition of the Ocean Health Index was
released, which shows that unsustainable
fishing has taken a toll on fish populations
around the world, putting many people's
food security at risk, said Ben Halpern, a
marine biologist at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, and the
project's lead scientist.
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The index ranks the health of the oceans
in 10 different categories, including
subjects such as purity of water and levels
of tourism, on a country-by-country
basis. This year the world's oceans scored
a 65 out of 100 possible points,
unchanged from when it was first
released last year, Halpern told
LiveScience. While it could be worse, the
score suggests there's "definite room for
improvement," he said.
Overfished
The index's category of "natural
products" — a measure of how well
humans sustainably use non-food ocean
products such as fish oil, sponges,
ornamental fish and coral products —
received the lowest score this year, with a
31 out of 100, according to the index's
website . The low score is an indicator of
overfishing, which takes fish and other
ocean resources out of the ocean faster
than they can be replenished, a statement
from the index said. For this same reason,
the category of food production also
scored low, a 33. [Video: Humans Hit the
Oceans Hard]
The index also found that many countries
have less natural protection from storms
and hurricanes than they did several
decades ago, with a number of these are
in the annual path of tropical cyclones,
according to the index.
Halpern said the index has helped him
visualize and integrate many disparate
aspects of the world's oceans into a single
whole. "It was really transformative in
how it helped me understand the oceans
(and) gives me far deeper insight into
what is doing well and what isn't when it
comes to improving the oceans' health,"
Halpern said.
Halpern and colleagues have worked on
the index for more than six years, and at
different times up to 20 scientists have
been employed full time. The plan is to
update the index every year, to see how
patterns change over time. For instance,
in the span of one year certain changes
have popped up; for example, increased
pollution in Eastern European countries
has reduced several countries' scores,
Halpern said.
Some debate
Not all ocean scientists are finding the
index useful, though.
Jake Rice, chief scientist with Fisheries and
Oceans Canada, told LiveScience he was
"cautiously positive about it" when the
index first came out last year. Since then,
however, he thinks that the index has
gotten too complicated, in part due to
criticisms that it was oversimplifying.
"Now it's harder to interpret what the
values mean," he said.
Rice also said that the index appears to be
unduly affected by countries' economies
and relative isolation, and that values
aren't likely to change much from year-to-
year. For that reason, the index may say
more about static or slowly changing
aspects of each country — such as the
geography and economy — than about
the relative health of the ocean in each
area. And because of this, a yearly update
provides little value for a lot of effort, he
added.
That said, over longer time scales, it could
help show trends in ocean health in
different countries, Rice said.
Becky Goldburg, director of ocean
science for the PEW Charitable Trusts, an
environmental and public policy group,
said the index helps to combine disparate
information about the world's oceans and
how conditions change over time. The
focus on overfishing is apt, she said, since
"it's certainly one of the major problems
in ocean management."
Email Douglas Main or follow him
on Twitter or Google+ . Follow us
livescience , Facebook or Google+ .
Article originally on LiveScience.
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Changing the World
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and Poison Problems | Video
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Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a
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reserved. This material may not be
published, broadcast, rewritten or
redistributed.
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Discuss 11
Steffi Burchardt
One of the thousands of cone-sheets from
Ardnamurchan volcano, exposed as an
inclined wall of basalt.The land of the rings brings hundreds of
pilgrims to a windswept corner of western
Scotland every year.
A journey around Ardnamurchan
volcano's well-worn trails is an annual
rite of passage for geology students in
Europe. Regular tourists also brave the
remote trek to the national geopark,
which protects 1 billion years of Earth's
history.
Ardnamurchan's fame comes from an 83-
year-old study that launched volcano
science in Europe. The study, a
meticulous geologic map of ringlike
structures preserved in the
Ardnamurchan volcanic rocks, revealed
the volcano's hidden source: a series of
three magma chambers.
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Now, it's time to rewrite history, scientists
say.
Instead of three magma pulses, just one
big push birthed Ardnamurchan volcano,
according to a study published Oct. 8 in
the journal Scientific Reports.
"What we see is one big magma chamber.
There's not three distinct places," said
Steffi Burchardt, lead study author and a
geoscientist at the University of Uppsala
in Sweden. "It is much more like we see
magma chambers Ardnamurchan is one of four extinct
volcanoes on Scotland's northwest coast
that mark the opening of the North
Atlantic Ocean starting 60 million years
ago. As Greenland drifted away, the first
floods of magma arrived from a hotspot
that now sits under Iceland . In epochs
since, glaciers ground away the tops of
the volcanoes, leaving their hearts
exposed.
Nearly a century ago, British geologists
mapped hundreds of thin, cone-shaped
intrusions at Ardnamurchan. The
intrusions are magma that pushed into
underground cracks and cooled beneath
the surface. They're like guiding arrows,
arranged in a ring, narrowing down
toward their source. [ The 10 Biggest
Volcanic Eruptions in History]
The original mappers, James Richey and
Herbert Thomas, concluded that three
distinct magma chambers fed
Ardnamurchan volcano, because the
"cone sheets," as the intrusions are called,
converged at three different spots.
But when Burchardt and her colleagues
brought Ardnamurchan's geologic map
into the modern age, inputting the
precisely mapped structures into a 3-D
computer model, they encountered a
surprise.
Instead of three meeting sites, the cone
sheets focused on a single, saucer-shaped
chamber where the roiling molten rock
once awaited its release. The chamber lies
about 1.5 kilometers (1 mile) below the
current surface and was up to 6 km (4
miles) long when active.
The size and alignment of the magma
chamber created by the computer model
matches with recent geophysical surveys
of the volcano , as well as displacements in
sedimentary rocks, Burchardt said. (The
covering rocks were shoved and
deformed as the magma pushed its way
upward.)
Burchardt said that since the 1930 study,
knowledge of how volcanoes form has
advanced tremendously. "They were
among the scientists who laid the
foundation of modern volcanology," she
said. "I guess if they had all the
knowledge we had today, they may have
seen Ardnamurchan differently."
"The mountain is a real icon, so people
have a bit of respect for it," Burchardt
told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.
"Maybe this is the reason why scientists
haven't dared
