Inside Science News Briefs

A collection of brief stories from the world of science

By Chris Gorski and Jim Dawson
Inside Science News Service
October 27, 2008

Rumbling Laptops

Two California researchers, taking advantage of the accelerometer chips in newer-model laptop computers, are building up a public Internet link that uses those chips to create a wide-spread earthquake detection system. When an earthquake rolls through Southern California, for example, laptops linked with special software through the Quake-Catcher Network automatically report the shaking. If the scientists suddenly get reports from many laptops, they know it is likely an earthquake is underway. The network is led by Elizabeth Cochran at the University of California, Riverside, and Jesse Lawrence at Stanford University.

While scientific earthquake detectors are much more sensitive than the average laptop, they also are much more expensive, costing between $10,000 and $100,000. And the real detectors can pickup subtle signals of distant earthquakes that are beyond the sensitivity of laptop computers. But, Lawrence said, "with many more cheap sensors, instead of guessing where strong motions were felt by interpolating between sensors, we should be able to know where strong motions were felt immediately, because we have sensors [in the form of laptop computers]there."

Anyone with a laptop or desktop computer that contains a motion-sensing chip can join the Quake-Catcher Network at http://qcn.stanford.edu. The software needed to turn your laptop into an earthquake detector is available at the site, and is the same software used by the SETI [Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence]organization that allows people to use their home computers to help in the search for smart aliens. The quake network has filters that can tell the difference between a real earthquake and heavy typing.

Ancient Global Warming Built a "Magnetic Death Star" in Prehistoric Atlantic Ocean

Geobiologists studying material from a borehole in Ancora, New Jersey, have discovered a cluster of spearhead-shaped, biologically formed magnetic crystals that they have dubbed the "Magnetic Death Star." These iron oxide crystals were grouped together in a spherical shape that appears to be different from any known organism in the fossil record.

"Imagine our surprise to discover not only a fossil bloom of bacteria that make iron-oxide magnets within their cells, but also an entirely unknown set of organisms that grew magnetic crystals to giant sizes," said California Institute of Technology postdoctoral student Timothy Raub, who collected the samples from an petroleum drilling core that was in a storehouse at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

The bacteria use the magnetic material in their cells to orient themselves with the Earth's magnetic field. The researchers, from McGill University and Princeton University, as well as Caltech, said that they do not know if this organism is extinct today or if it has merely never before been found.

The magnetic crystals appeared in the rock in unusual sizes, as much as eight times larger than the previous largest bacterial iron-oxide crystals ever found. Publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors declared that the United States mid-Atlantic coast must have been an iron rich environment 55 million years ago, much different than it is today. According to coauthor Robert Kopp, "These fossils may be telling a story of radical environmental transformation: Imagine a river like the Amazon flowing at least occasionally where the Potomac is today."

Hypnotists Induce Experiences of Synesthesia, make the Letter "A" Vanish

Researchers from Israel, England, and Spain collaborated on a project that demonstrated that people with average brains are capable of having synesthetic experiences, meaning that triggering one of the senses causes the involuntary use of another. Examples of this phenomenon include when people consistently see a certain numerical digit as a certain color or when hearing a certain sound triggers the experience of a certain taste. The findings, published in the journal Psychological Science, contradict the prevailing belief that synesthesia results only within people who have extra synaptic connections in their brain.

Using a technique called posthypnotic suggestion, the researchers showed that it is possible to induce people to have synesthetic experiences. One test to confirm that the participants were truly experiencing synesthesia involved asking those who had been hypnotized to see the numeral “7” as red if they could see the number when it was printed in black against a red background. If the participants were unable to see the digit, the researchers concluded that the hypnotically-induced synesthesia was real. The research shows that "cross-talk" within the brain can be the cause of synesthetic experiences, not extra brain connections. Coauthor Cohen Kadosh said "this takes us one step closer to understanding the causes of synesthesia and abnormal cross-brain interactions."
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