Geophysicists studying the 12 January earthquake in Haiti met yesterday with United Nations representatives and Haitian president René Garcia Préval to discuss what the latest measurements of the Earth’s shape can tell policymakers about future earthquakes. Several such ongoing geodesy studies suggest that the magnitude 7.0 earthquake, which has killed over 170,000 people so far, caused a 30- to 50-kilometre stretch of the fault southwest of Port-au-Prince to slip — possibly adding tension along an unreleased stretch of the same fault that passes even closer to Haiti’s capital.
Read the rest of the story on Nature News [html] or here [pdf]
A new analysis based on an Apollo scientist’s copies of lost NASA data seeks to determine how sticky, abrasive moon dust will affect lengthier future lunar missions.
The author of the new study, Brian O’Brien, was the principal investigator for the dust detectors left behind in 1969 by the first two manned missions to the Moon, Apollo 11 and Apollo 12. At the time, O’Brien was a professor of space science at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Continue reading Apollo scientist dusts off ‘lost’ lunar data→
In my second week at Nature I’ve gotten to feel more like a member of the team, if being asked to write more and more is any measure. I’ve contributed more to news meetings, talked with my colleagues about their backgrounds and journalism plans over lunch, and begun working on an unusual feature slated to appear soon…but which will have to remain a mystery for now.
I wrote a news story about how clouds actually make the air around them brighter, a story that made made me feel better about living in Britain. I also wrote about a study in which economists were surprised to find that hormone treatment did not have an effect on how the women made economic decisions–something that recent reports hinted did happen in men.
The countries that run Antarctica are having their annual meeting in Baltimore, so I blogged about how US delegates are pushing for mandatory tourism limits. Finally, I summarized a report from entomologists who used a butterfly family tree to bolster a theory that butterflies use eyespot patterns on some parts of their wings to attract mates and patterns on other parts of their wings as camouflage from predators: [pdf].
A study looking at why clouds make the air near them glow more brightly suggests climate models may need to be revised.
Atmospheric scientists already account for the brighter air close to clouds, thanks to a 2007 study by Ilan Koren and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. The team showed that cloud droplets, attached to dust and smoke particles, float in a halo kilometres wide around clouds, bouncing sunlight back out of the atmosphere. Seen from a satellite, that means air close to clouds looks brighter.
Read the rest of the story on Nature’s new site: [html]
Journalist covering global development by way of science and technology.
Geophysicists studying the 12 January earthquake in Haiti met yesterday with United Nations representatives and Haitian president René Garcia Préval to discuss what the latest measurements of the Earth’s shape can tell policymakers about future earthquakes. Several such ongoing geodesy studies suggest that the magnitude 7.0 earthquake, which has killed over 170,000 people so far, caused a 30- to 50-kilometre stretch of the fault southwest of Port-au-Prince to slip — possibly adding tension along an unreleased stretch of the same fault that passes even closer to Haiti’s capital.
In my second week at Nature I’ve gotten to feel more like a member of the team, if being asked to write more and more is any measure. I’ve contributed more to news meetings, talked with my colleagues about their backgrounds and journalism plans over lunch, and begun working on an unusual feature slated to appear soon…but which will have to remain a mystery for now.