I have to admit, Grasshopper is probably the coolest advance in rocketry that I've ever seen.

It’s not quite the T-1000 pulling itself together after being blown apart, but it’s pretty much the same idea. For the first time in history, scientists have observed the self-assembly of nanoparticles in real-time.

Each of the particles seen in the video above measures a scant 12 nanometers across. To put that in perspective, you’d have to divide the thin side of a dime by a thousand, and then take one of those slivers and divide it by a thousand again. That’s roughly one nanometer.

That’s mighty, mighty tiny — so tiny in fact that the researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory had to use a transmission electron microscope located at the Center for Nanoscale Materials to capture the quick movement of the nanoparticles.

To get the tiny bits to re-assemble, the researchers put the gold nanoparticles into a small liquid pouch and covered it with a positively charged coating. When it was exposed to an intense beam of electrons, an effect was created where “hydrated” electrons attracted the positively charged nanoparticles — but it was an effect that was gradually reduced over time. Once freed from these forces, the nanoparticles were able to jump around and stick together in long chains.

This isn’t anything new, but it’s the first time the phenomenon was actually observed and chronicled by scientists.

Getting nanoparticles to move around is a big deal. Though still primitive, experiments like these could pave the way towards more meaningful manipulations of particles at the nano-scale. Eventually, researchers will be able to harness these movements to create microscopic machines (similar to how nano-scale biological systems work within our bodies), build new materials, and even harvest energy.

Oh, and maybe even create a T-1000-like mimetic poly-alloy.

Check out the entire study: “In Situ Visualization of Self-Assembly of Charged Gold Nanoparticles.”

When it comes to the theory of the Higgs boson, British physicist Peter Higgs gets all the love. But that’s not fair, says Carl Hagen, arguing that he and four other scientists deserve just as much credit. The time has come, he says, to officially rename the so-called God particle.

We've covered the battle over what to call the Higgs boson before, but here's a quick recap: Back in 1964, Peter Higgs developed a theory of how other sub-atomic particles came to have substance, or mass. But five other researchers independently came to the same conclusion and made key contributions to the idea — a group of physicists that include Francois Englert, Gerald Guralnik, Tom Kibble, Robert Brout, and the University of Rochester’s Carl Hagen.

Last year, when the discovery of the Higgs particle was announced, five of the scientists gathered together at a press conference — but it was Higgs who received the huge round of applause from the audience.

Fed up — and in consideration of a potential Nobel Prize — Hagen says enough is enough; it’s time to acknowledge the work of others.

"Peter Higgs was treated as something of a rock star and the rest of us were barely recognised by most of the audience. It was clear that Higgs was the dominant name because of the fact his name has become associated with the boson," he recently told BBC World News. "To single out one individual marginalises the contribution of others involved in the work. Although I did not start this campaign to change the name, I welcome it."

It’s not immediately clear how the name could be changed, however. Particles tend to be named after (or by) the person who predicted them.

But at a physics conference last month, researchers were encouraged to refer to the particle as the “SM Scalar Boson.” Hagen himself would like to see it referred to as the “Standard Model Scalar Meson,” or “SM Squared.” Another possibility would be the creation of an acronym derived from the names of the six scientists involved, something like “BEHGHK,” which would be pronounced “berk.”

Weirdly, only three scientists can be awarded a Nobel Prize for a given discovery or breakthrough. Hagen would like to see all six get the award (presuming it happens), along with the team of scientists and engineers working at the Large Hadron Collider.

Source: BBC.

Images: Texas A&M University, Paul Rincon via BBC.

Yes!

For the past three years, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory has had an uninterrupted view of the sun. This exquisitely detailed video now shows those three years at a pace of two images per day, chronicling the sun's rise toward solar maximum.

Watching this video you can easily see the sun's 25-day rotation and how its solar activity increased over that time. The image is surprisingly stable given that the SDO spacecraft's distance to the sun is changing over time, that it's orbiting the Earth at 6,876 mph, and that the Earth is orbiting the sun at 67,062 mph.

Here are some neat events to look for in the video:

• 00:30;24 Partial eclipse by the moon
• 00:31;16 Roll maneuver
• 01:11;02 August 9, 2011 X6.9 Flare, currently the largest of this solar cycle
• 01:28;07 Comet Lovejoy, December 15, 2011
• 01:42;29 Roll Maneuver
• 01:51;07 Transit of Venus, June 5, 2012
• 02:28;13 Partial eclipse by the moon

Source: NASA.

A lab at the University of Milan was raided by animal rights activists this past weekend, taking nearly 100 mutated mice (and one rabbit) with them and mixing up cage labels to confuse researchers. It could take years for the facility to recover.

As Nature News reports, no arrests were made after the 12-hour standoff, but the University of Milan is planning to press charges against the group responsible, Stop Green Hill (the name is a reference to an Italian dog-breeding facility the activists are opposed to).

The Milan facility is used to experiment on genetically altered animals for research into autism, schizophrenia, and other psychiatric disorders.

During the raid, and as hundreds of animal-rights sympathizers demonstrated outside, five individuals made their way into the facility, likely with an illegally acquired electronic card.

Alison Abbott tells us more:

They pried open the reinforced doors of the facility on the fourth floor, and two of them chained themselves by the neck to the main double doors such that any attempt to open the doors could have endangered their lives.

They posted pictures of themselves on their organisation’s website, where they also declared that they would stay for as long as it took to get agreement to leave with all the animals. The facility hosts around 800 animals, mostly genetically modified mice but also some rabbits, according to Martino Bolognesi, a structural biologist at the university. The activists had brought supplies of food and sleeping bags.

Here's the video taken by Stop Green Hill:

And what the demonstration outside the facility looked like:

Some of the mice that were taken are “delicate mutants” and immunosuppressed “nude” mice that will most assuredly die outside of the lab’s controlled environment. Moreover, because many of these animals are models for psychiatric conditions, they may also be suffering from undue psychological stress (though a case could also be made for the opposite).

Stop Green Hill issued an official statement to explain its actions (translation by Google):

With this unprecedented action we want to document the conditions in which animals live and experiments that are conducted, showing them to the whole society with photographs and films; give visibility to the problem of vivisection and the places where it is practiced, thus giving a name also those who practice it, to start a peaceful siege inside and in front of the laboratory with the request that the animals are released and that the Ministry and the Palaces put an end to the false promises and truly start to take steps towards the abolition of animal testing.

The researchers say that "vivisection" is not practiced at the facility, but that they're conducting "basic research aimed at discovery of therapies for diseases that are incurable and severely disabling that plague our society."

Here’s how the Italian Researchers responded (translation by Google):

The damage done is difficult to quantify, but it’s in the order of hundreds of thousands of euro...it goes far beyond the loss of animals illegally removed...they took the cards to all the cages, making it no longer possible to identify the animals thus sending in smoke the work of years of scientific research and its funding...[our] research focuses largely on diseases of the nervous system, for which there is a desperate need of care, which is currently not available: autism, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, Multiple Sclerosis, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Prader-Willi syndrome, nicotine addiction, and our research is funded by national and international bodies including Telethon, AIRC, NIDA, Cariplo Foundation, Fondazione Mariani, Multiple Sclerosis Foundation, European Community, the Ministry of Research, Ministry of Health, Region Lombardy. The loans are obtained through rigorous evaluation processes and results are published in top international journals in the field.

The incident on Saturday creates a precedent of unprecedented severity. Animal rights activists have claimed the right to block the research approved by the competent offices of the Ministry of Research, conducted in accordance with all national and international standards on the treatment of experimental animals, financed by public authorities but also by non-profit foundations, the latter supported by donations of generous citizens interested in public health. The enclosures of the Department of medical biotechnology and translational medicine meet all the requirements of the applicable European legislation, and animals (mice, rats and rabbits, bred for the sole purposes of research and unable to survive in the environment different from that of the laboratory) are maintained with the utmost care.

It’s true that animal testing represents a delicate ethical problem; public awareness about this problem has led to the adoption in recent years of the legislation regulating the use of animals in research, resulting in a huge improvement of housing conditions and with the elimination of unnecessary suffering which they may be subjected. However, it is equally undeniable that the great advances in medicine and the development of therapeutics, has only been possible through the use of laboratory animals, you will need to use also desirable for future developments.

The researchers say it could take up to one year for a team of three scientists to build up the colonies of mouse models of different psychiatric diseases.

Simulating the complex ebbs and flows of liquid in real-time is not easy, but this jaw-dropping new demonstration from PhysX shows we'll eventually get there.

This new system is called Position Based Fluids (pdf), and it works off a previously developed model called Position Based Dynamics. The new algorithm reduces water to a large series of small particles that adhere to a strict set of rules and conditions, including the influence of artificial pressure (to improve particle distribution), the creation of surface tension (to create those gorgeous splashes), and even gradual energy loss. It can even account for the injection of new energy back into the fluid (called vorticity confinement).

Here's a supplementary video:

More at PhysX.

To commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA/ESA has released this gorgeous new image of the iconic Horsehead Nebula.

We've seen this stunning nebula before, but never quite like this. It's located in the constellation of Orion (The Hunter) and features massive plumes of gas in the infrared. The nebula, which will completely disintegrate in about five million years, was formed from a collapsing interstellar cloud of material.

The updated image was taken in the infrared light with the Wide Field Camera 3, which was added to the Hubble in 2009.

Before now, our best glimpse of the Horsehead Nebula looked like this (from a 2001 capture):

And the new image in all its glory:

More at Hubble Space Telescope.

Good point; added real-time to the lede.

By analyzing the flocking behavior of heavy metal concert goers in mosh pits, Cornell University researchers discovered that their collective actions closely approximate the way particles work in a two-dimensional gas.

While it might seem like frivolous work, this study has serious implications for understanding how people move in panic situations, like when fleeing from an emergency or when embroiled in a riot. By analyzing and simulating seemingly chaotic human behaviors — like flocking situations in this case — the researchers built a simplified model that could help designers create buildings and other structures to mitigate these risks.

And indeed, what could be better than studying mosh pits and circle pits? Long a staple of heavy metal and punk shows, they exemplify chaotic, swarming human behavior. In mosh pits, concert attendees move randomly, colliding with one another in an undirected fashion. A circle pit is where attendees form a swirling vortex.

Lead researcher Matthew Bierbaum analyzed and modeled these motions by watching mosh pits and circle pits featured in YouTube videos.

“Qualitatively, this phenomenon resembles the kinetics of gaseous particles, even though moshers are self-propelled agents that experience dissipative collisions,” writes Bierbaum in the study. His models show that moshers collide with each other randomly and at a distribution of speeds that resembles particles in a two-dimensional gas.

Mosh pit simulation:

Real mosh pit (at an In Flames concert):

Circle pit simulation:

Real circle pit (at a Killswitch Engage concert):

The researchers elaborate at their website:

Flocking simulations model living beings as simple particles, reducing complex behavioral dynamics to a few basic rules. In our case, we used two populations of simulated moshers, which we dub Mobile Active Simulated Humanoids, or MASHers. Active MASHers move around and have a tendency to follow their neighbors (in the technical literature, this is called "flocking"), while passive MASHers prefer to remain stationary. Mixing active and passive MASHers together, we found that when random collisions dominate the tendency to flock, the statistics of mosh pits are quantitatively reproduced. On the other hand, when the situation was reversed and flocking dominated randomness, we found an ordered vortex-like state. Looking back at videos of metal concerts, we found that actual moshers exhibited this vortex-like phenomenon too. These so-called "circle pits" spontaneously emerge from the simulation and are an interesting example of collective behavior in humans.

Recently, when speaking at the American Physical Society, Bierbaum remarked: “How these supposedly intelligent beings behave like an ideal gas, I don’t know.”

And interestingly, of all the circle pits analyzed, 95% of them moved in a clockwise direction, which Bierbaum attributes to humans’ dominant right-handedness.

The results are now available at the preprint site arXiv: “Collective Motion of Moshers at Heavy Metal Concerts.” More at the researchers’ website, Cohen Group.

Photo: Oxxte/Flickr.

Predicting future conflicts is not easy, especially considering that social unrest and dramatic political changes can happen at virtually any time. But world-altering events don’t unfold in a vacuum — it’s all about reading the signs. Here are seven geopolitical hotspots that have the potential to change the course of history.

Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the largely bipolar geopolitical superstructure, the world has become an increasingly fractured and unstable place. George W. Bush’s New World Order never materialized, due to dynamic economic, cultural, and political processes, the renewed rise of national interests, and the steady encroachment of sectarian radicalism.

There are many “hotspots” in the world today, including tenuous situations in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Central Asia, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, and Turkey. As awful as these situations are, none of them threaten to disrupt the global balance.

But after speaking to several futurists and international affairs experts, I learned that there are at least seven different possible scenarios that could trigger the start of the next major war.

1. Ongoing turmoil in Pakistan

Nuclear-capable Pakistan continues to be a headache for international observers. Ongoing drone strikes by U.S. forces have largely alienated its population of 176 million. The country is notorious for serving as a springboard for extremist groups, including those set against its mortal enemy, India. Pakistan has also suffered through three consecutive years of devastating floods, and thousands of civilians have been displaced on account of military occupations and militancy. The nation’s transition to democracy has been slow-going — a process that could be disrupted if extremist parties take power in the elections later this year.

I asked Georgia Tech’s Margaret Kosal about Pakistan, and she expressed her concerns with its government and the upper echelons of Pakistan’s military. The country is currently experiencing internal anti-government problems, which include, but are not limited to, Islamist radicals.

“The risk,” she told io9, is that “nuclear weapons may be acquired by groups outside the military or by those affiliated with such groups who would transfer them to transnationalist groups who will use them.” This, she contends, is just as likely a threat against India as the U.S. or other western nation. (image: Associated Press)

2. Unpredictable North Korea

The isolated and nuclear-capable nation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the last true Marxist hold-out. It's alone in a world dominated by capitalist interests. Kim Jong-un’s seemingly erratic and perplexingly belligerent behavior has even served to alienate its longtime ally, the People’s Republic of China.

While it’s tempting to poke fun at Kim for his recent tirade, his actions were actually quite calculated. Knowing that full-scale war would be certain suicide, Kim’s sabre rattling was a blatant attempt to rouse international attention (possibly for the purposes of forcing an easing of sanctions, or having its nuclear status recognized) and to compel its enemies into action and military overspending (the U.S. reacted by spending $1 billion to deploy additional ballistic missile interceptors along the Pacific Coast). Trouble is, Kim’s foot-stomping has increased tensions to such a considerable degree that even the slightest misunderstanding or provocation could result in an actual military exchange. It’s for this reason that the Korean situation remains an extremely dangerous one.

More about the map featured in the top image here.

3. Syria spillover

Syria is already embroiled in war — a conflict that has resulted in nearly 80,000 deaths.

Frighteningly, and as history has repeatedly shown, wars have a nasty tendency to drag other nations in, whether they like it or not. Though it’s been two years since the civil war began, the conflict shows no sign of ebbing; the Assad regime is proving difficult to topple. Moreover, the insurgency is divided, leading many experts to predict a second — and perhaps even more brutal — stage of the war, if and when the government is overthrown. The hardline Sunni Islamists are certainly bracing themselves for a fight. At the same time, the conflict threatens to trickle over into neighboring areas like Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, and Turkey — which could in turn work to further destabilize the Middle East. Add to this the potential for the U.S. and Russia to fight a proxy war in Syria, and you have a situation that bears an eerie resemblance to the Spanish Civil war of the 1930s — a precursor to the Second World War. (image: Alessio Romenzi/AFP/Getty Images)

4. Revolution in China

As the fall of the Eastern Bloc and Soviet Union starkly demonstrated, it’s often difficult to predict momentous disruptions in authoritarian states. A revolution or coup in one-party China certainly seems unlikely, but it’s definitely not an impossibility. The Brookings Institute, for example, considers a revolution in China to be a potential black swan event.

Margaret Kosal shares this concern, citing simmering internal challenges and the prospect of internal unrest. Factors at play in China include its highly problematic housing boom, the government’s growing emphasis on economic growth to ameliorate underlying civil discord, the rising (lower) middle class, corruption, lack of rule of law, and the huge disparity between a few enormously wealthy people and the rest of the population (many of whom are familiar with conditions in Hong Kong, thanks to the Internet).

“Over the last 25 years, the CCP has fomented very strong nationalism,” Kosal told io9. So, with greater attention from the global community, potential instability from a rise of China competing with the West (and especially the U.S.), along with long-standing unresolved internal tensions, we have what Kosal calls “a very worrisome mix.” And indeed, given China’s recent row with Japan over islands in the East China Sea, the region is perhaps not as stable as it appears to be. Add North Korea to the mix as a possible troublemaker, and the potential for increased tensions in the area is likewise heightened. (image: Xinhua)

5. War against Iran

Last year at the United Nations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu famously drew his “red line” for Iran’s nuclear program — the “final stage” to a bomb in which Iran was over 90% of the way towards having sufficient weapons-grade material.

His hope, of course, was to have Iran back down from its nuclear ambitions. It’s the closest that any Israeli official has come to publicly laying out precisely which Iranian actions could trigger an Israeli military strike on Tehran's nuclear infrastructure. The Hawkish PM has advised the United States to preemptively attack Iran, a strike that would likely require hundreds of planes, ships, and missiles.

But the fear is not that Iran could develop a nuclear bomb — but whom they might give it to. Indeed, as recent events in Canada have shown, Iran’s commitment to suppressing the rise of terrorist groups is now seriously in question. (Image: Jason Szenes/EPA/NBC)

6. Vulnerable North Africa

Events in Mali, Algeria, and Nigeria have made it clear that radical Islam is working its way south from the Middle East. Earlier this year, French troops liberated the northern portion of Mali from the quasi-totalitarian Sharia yoke set up by al Qaeda-linked fundamentalists, while insurgents attacked an oil refinery in Algeria killing over 80 international workers. Meanwhile in Nigeria, the radical Islamist group Boko Haram has been blamed for thousands of deaths in recent years. And the situation in Egypt (not to mention Libya) is far from resolved given that the Muslim Brotherhood has essentially established a new Islamist state.

Looking to the future, radicalism could trickle down into other parts of Africa — a highly vulnerable region with a weak infrastructure, an inability to defend itself against an experienced and determined opponent — and an impressionable and marginalized population featuring a median age of 20. Could Africa become the next Middle East? (Image: AP)

7. Saudi collapse

As with a possible revolution in China, things could change quickly in Saudi Arabia. It’s the world’s last absolute monarchy, a nation in which King Abdallah has complete authority.

The Brookings Institute’s Peter W. Singer told io9 that Saudi Arabia features a “combustible mix” in which a succession crisis lurks around the corner. Indeed, as foreign policy expert Bruce Riedel notes, a revolution is conceivable, owing to the Arab Awakenings. He writes:

[Its] combination of religious piety and vast revenues has so far been sufficient to stave off the kind of unrest that has shaken much of the Arab world in recent years.

Nevertheless, revolutionary change in the Kingdom would be a disaster for American interests across the board. As the world’s swing oil producer, prolonged instability in Saudi Arabia would cause havoc in global oil markets, setting back economic recovery in the West and disrupting economic growth in the East.

Saudi Arabia is a wealthy country, but it has plenty of internal problems, including those churned by significant income disparities. Its Sunni/Shia mix is another interesting consideration. As Singer told us, a revolution in Riyadh is “low probability, but big impact.” (Image: Reuters).

Other sources: Foreign Policy (1) (2).

Archaeologists working in Romania’s Transylvania region have discovered a young male and female skeleton from the late Middle Ages who were buried facing each other and holding hands. Locals have dubbed the couple “Romeo and Juliet,” but historians have their own take on the unique double burial.

Researchers from the Institute of Archaeology and Art History and the Cluj National History Museum discovered the pair while excavating the courtyard of the Sigismund Toduta Music High School, originally a 15th century Dominican monastery. According to senior researcher Adrian Rusu, the couple probably lived sometime between 1450 and 1550.

The male appears to have been killed by a blunt-force blow to his chest, breaking his sternum. It’s not clear what caused the death of his female companion. But while the scene certainly has a Shakespearean quality to it, it’s unlikely that the woman killed herself.

The History Blog explains:

She can’t have committed suicide Juliet-style when her man died because she would not have been allowed to be buried in consecrated ground, and certainly not within the hallowed walls of a monastery. Perhaps, Rusu speculates, she died from a heart attack or a stroke brought on by the shock of his accidental death.

Sure, he is totally pulling that explanation out of his fundament and his appreciation for the PR value of our collective cultural vernacular, but it is mysterious that they died fairly young, at the same time and only one of them shows signs of fatal trauma. I can think of several explanations that don’t require the broken heart ex machina, though. She could have died first of an illness that can’t be detected in the bones or that hasn’t been yet. She could have had an unfortunate encounter with the wrong mushroom. The male then entirely by coincidence had some kind of workplace accident or tangled with the wrong horse that broke his sternum with one well-placed kick. Really, there are many possibilities.

The researchers also uncovered the skeleton of a child and a fourth incomplete skeleton.

Source: Romania-Insider and History Blog.

Scientists have scales to measure the strength of natural phenomena like earthquakes and hurricanes. But what about the eruptive power of volcanoes? For that, geologists use the Volcanic Explosivity Index. Here’s how it works.

The Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) was first proposed in 1982 by Christopher Newhall of the U.S. Geological Survey and Stephen Self of the University of Hawaii. Their intention was to develop a scale to estimate the explosive magnitude of historical volcanoes.

To that end, they came up with an incrementing logarithmic scale to measure the magnitude of past explosive eruptions, which Newhall described as a “semiquantitative compromise between poor data and the need in various disciplines to evaluate the record of past volcanism.”

But establishing the parameters for a useful scale proved easier said than done. Unlike earthquakes or hurricanes, there are different types of volcanoes, and they produce different products, like massive plumes of ejected rock and ash, or molten lava flows.

Moreover, and as scientists later learned, volcanoes also churn-out varying degrees of sulfur dioxide at rates irrespective of eruptive power. It’s for that reason that the VEI had to be rejected as a way to measure an eruption's potential impact on the climate. Today, it’s used exclusively to measure the explosive power of both historic and new eruptions.

How the Scale Works

Similar to the Richter scale, the VEI uses a numerical index ranging from 0 to 8. Each increment represents an 10-fold increase in explosivity.

Factors that are taken into account include the volume of pyroclastic material (including ashfall, pyroclastic flows, and other ejecta), the height of the eruption, duration in hours, and a number of other qualitative measurements.

So, given that the scale is primarily driven by the volume ejected, it goes like this:

• VEI 0: eruptions that produce less than 0.0001 cubic kilometer of ejecta (small events that typically produce flowing lava, which is called an effusive eruption)
• VEI 1: eruptions that produce between 0.0001 and 0.001 cubic kilometers of ejecta
• VEI 2: eruptions that produce between 0.001 and 0.01 cubic kilometers of ejecta
• VEI 3: eruptions that produce between 0.01 and 0.1 cubic kilometers of ejecta

And so on until we get to VEI 8.

So, a VEI 5 is roughly 100 times more explosive than a VEI 3, and a VEI 8 is a million times more powerful than a VEI 2. Sometimes a + symbol is added to account for the wide degree of variation between each number in the scale.

The VEI doesn’t go past 8, but that doesn’t mean a VEI 9 isn’t impossible. Scientists may still uncover evidence of such an event buried somewhere in the geological record.

Eruptions Throughout History

And indeed, by using the VEI, geologists have been able to document the Earth’s tumultuous volcanic past. Here’s a graphic put together by Geology.com that shows the relative impact of notable historical eruptions:

Shockingly, as this graphic shows, a volcanic eruption like the one at Mt. St. Helens — a cataclysmic event that blew a huge chunk off the side of the mountain — is absolutely dwarfed in comparison to some of the larger ones. The size of the Yellowstone eruption is also disturbing given that the caldera could erupt at any time.

Geology.com elaborates on the jaw-dropping power of megavolcanoes:

Forty-seven eruptions have been rated VEI 8 because they are thought to have produced an amazing 1,000 cubic kilometers or more of ejecta. This would be a mass of uncompacted ejecta ten kilometers in length, ten kilometers in width and ten kilometers deep. Eruptions at Toba (74,000 years ago), Yellowstone (640,000 years ago) and Lake Taupo (26,500 years ago) are three of the 47 VEI 8 sites that have been identified.

The VEI 8 eruption with the greatest volume of ejecta known to have occurred in the United States, and possibly in the world, was at La Garita Caldera in southwestern Colorado about 28 million years ago. There, the Fish Canyon Tuff has an original estimated volume of about 5,000 cubic kilometers!

Eruption(s) at the Paraná and Etendeka traps igneous province had an eruptive volume of over 2.6 million cubic kilometers. However, these are thought to be effusive eruptions producing fluid basalt lava rather than explosive eruptions producing ejecta. The Paraná and Etendeka eruption(s) occurred about 128 to 138 million years ago. Their lava flows span from eastern Brazil onto the western portions of Namibia and Angola. They occurred when Africa and South America were connected.

Historically speaking, as the value of VEI increases, the frequency of that type of eruption decreases.

Other notable eruptions (via the U.S. Geological Survey):

• The Mono-Inyo Craters Volcanic Chain, California, during the past 5,000 years, ranging from VEI 1 to 3
• The 1815 eruption of Tambora, Indonesia, had a VEI of 7 and a volume in excess of 100 km³

Sources: United States Geological Survey, Geology.com, Newhall (1982).

Top image: Volcanogeek.

Researchers from the Smithsonian have restored a 128 year-old recording of Alexander Graham Bell's voice from a wax-and-cardboard disc. It's our first opportunity to hear what the famous inventor actually sounded like.

The restoration, which involved the conversion of high-resolution optical scans to digital audio format, was conducted by physicist Carl Haber and curator Carlene Stephens of the National Museum of American History.

“In witness whereof — hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell.”

Writing in Smithsonian, Charlotte Gray explains:

Bell conducted his sound experiments between 1880 and 1886, collaborating with his cousin Chichester Bell and technician Charles Sumner Tainter. They worked at Bell’s Volta Laboratory, at 1221 Connecticut Avenue in Washington, originally established inside what had been a stable. In 1877, his great rival, Thomas Edison, had recorded sound on embossed foil; Bell was eager to improve the process. Some of Bell’s research on light and sound during this period anticipated fiber-optic communications.

Inside the lab, Bell and his associates bent over their pioneering audio apparatus, testing the potential of a variety of materials, including metal, wax, glass, paper, plaster, foil and cardboard, for recording sound, and then listening to what they had embedded on discs or cylinders. However, the precise methods they employed in early efforts to play back their recordings are lost to history.

As a result, says curator Carlene Stephens of the National Museum of American History, the discs, ranging from 4 to 14 inches in diameter, remained “mute artifacts.” She began to wonder, she adds, “if we would ever know what was on them.”

After learning about Haber's success in restoring early recordings made in Paris in 1860, Stephens contacted him to see if he could do the same for Bell's artifacts. His scanning technique worked, this being the remarkable result.

More at Smithsonian.

By using Darwin’s principle of natural selection, researchers from Cornell University’s Creative Machines Lab got these virtual robots to evolve into proficient (albeit goofy) walking machines.

It was an experiment that led to some rather bizarre — and laughable — styles of locomotion.

The algorithm devised by the researchers was fairly straightforward. As biological evolution has shown time and time again, a simple set of rules, along with a ton of patience, can produce some rather remarkable things.

In this case, a research team led by Jeff Clune created an evolution simulator by endowing (relatively immobile) soft robots called soft-voxels with four basic building blocks to work with, namely muscle (shown in red), soft tissue support (teal), expanding and contracting muscles (green), and bone for hard support (blue). And importantly, they also programmed the system such that the faster bots would reproduce more. Speed, therefore, became a beneficial mutation (or adaptation) which served to increase a voxel's reproductive fitness.

Once these parameters were set, all Clune and his team had to do was press the start button and let evolution do the rest.

“Evolution did all the heavy lifting: there is no human in the loop after we start the Darwinian process," noted Clune in a YouTube comment. "It is definitely evidence for evolution doing impressive things, not for intelligent design.”

And indeed, after 1,000 generations, the system produced a series of fairly efficient walkers — some stranger than others. Perhaps unsurprisingly, bipedal locomotion emerged from the simulation, but so too did other techniques, like crawling, jiggling, flapping, and jumping. Some of the soft robots appeared to be animal-like, while others simply looked like crawling blobs of multi-colored pixels.

Writing in their paper, the researchers noted that locomotion performance increased as more materials were added to the voxels, and that “diversity and form and behavior can be increased with different cost functions without stifling performance, and that organisms can be evolved at different levels of resolution.”

Looking to the future, these findings suggest that scaled-up systems could be used to evolve “a large diversity of complex, natural, multi-material creatures” — creatures that could never be designed by straightforward engineering alone.

Read the entire paper: “Unshackling Evolution: Evolving Soft Robots with Multiple Materials and a Powerful Generative Encoding.” (pdf)

A new X-ray analysis of molten iron has revealed that the Earth’s inner core is 1,000 degrees hotter than previously thought.

The new measurements, which were made by Agnes Dewaele from the French research agency CEA, along with members of the French National Center for Scientific Research CNRS and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility ESRF in Grenoble, now sets the temperature of the Earth’s inner core at a blistering 6,000 degrees Celsius.

It’s a figure that matches up well with other estimates suggesting a temperature difference between the solid core and the mantle above of at least 1,500 degrees — a contributing factor to the presence of the Earth’s magnetic field.

Previous estimates, which were achieved by measuring iron’s melting curves, placed the core temperature at 5,000 degrees. But the new technique, which utilizes fast X-ray diffraction, allowed the researchers to probe tiny speck-like samples of iron at intense pressures to get an enhanced sense of how iron crystals form and melt.

Indeed, a challenge for the researchers was to replicate the monumental pressures at the core boundary — pressures that are a million times greater than what’s experienced at sea level. To achieve this, Dewaele and her team used a device called a static laser-heated diamond anvil cell, a name that pretty much describes what it is. With this tool, the scientists were able to take a tiny iron sample and hold it between the points of two precision-machined synthetic diamonds.

Then, the iron was placed under high pressure and blasted by lasers. Working at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, the researchers analyzed the way X-ray beams bounced off the nuclei of the iron atoms. As the iron changed from solid to liquid, the researchers observed changes to the diffraction patterns, which in turn provided the data required to measure partially molten states of iron.

The researchers found that iron has a melting point of 4,800 degrees Celsius at 2.2 million atmospheres of pressure (up to 200 GPa). Extrapolating this to 3.3 million atmospheres — the estimated pressure between the liquid and solid core — the scientsts reached their figure of 6,000 degrees Celsius (+/- 500), or 6,230 kelvin.

Read the entire study at Science: “Melting of Iron at Earth’s Inner Core Boundary Based on Fast X-ray Diffraction.”

Top image: via AXN: The Core.

I couldn't resist.

A provocative new paper is proposing that complex intelligent behavior may emerge from a fundamentally simple physical process. The theory offers novel prescriptions for how to build an AI — but it also explains how a world-dominating superintelligence might come about. We spoke to the lead author to learn more.

In the paper, which now appears in Physical Review Letters, Harvard physicist and computer scientist Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross posits a Maximum Causal Entropy Production Principle — a conjecture that intelligent behavior in general spontaneously emerges from an agent’s effort to ensure its freedom of action in the future. According to this theory, intelligent systems move towards those configurations which maximize their ability to respond and adapt to future changes.

Causal Entropic Forces

It’s an idea that was partially inspired by Raphael Bousso’s Causal Entropic Principle, which suggests that universes which produce a lot of entropy over the course of their lifetimes (i.e., a gradual decline into disorder) tend to have properties, such as the cosmological constant, that are more compatible with the existence of intelligent life as we know it.

“I found Bousso’s results, among others, very suggestive since they hinted that perhaps there was some deeper, more fundamental, relationship between entropy production and intelligence,” Wissner-Gross told io9.

The reason that entropy production over the lifetime of the universe seems to correlate with intelligence, he says, may be because intelligence actually emerges directly from a form of entropy production over shorter time spans.

“So the big picture — and the connection with the Anthropic Principle — is that the universe may actually be hinting to us as to how to build intelligences by telling us through the tunings of various cosmological parameters what the physical phenomenology of intelligence is,” he says.

To test this theory, Wissner-Gross, along with his MIT colleague Cameron Freer, created a software engine called Entropica. The software allowed them to simulate a variety of model universes and then apply an artificial pressure to those universes to maximize causal entropy production.

“We call this pressure a Causal Entropic Force — a drive for the system to make as many futures accessible as possible,” he told us. “And what we found was, based on this simple physical process, that we were actually able to successfully reproduce standard intelligence tests and other cognitive behaviors, all without assigning any explicit goals.”

For example, Entropica was able to pass multiple animal intelligence tests, play human games, and even earn money trading stocks. Entropica also spontaneously figured out how to display other complex behaviors like upright balancing, tools use, and social cooperation.

In an earlier version of the upright balancing experiment, which involved an agent on a pogo-stick, Entropica was powerful enough to figure out that, by pushing up and down again repeatedly in a specific manner, it could “break” the simulation. Wissner-Gross likened it to an advanced AI trying to break out of its confinement.

“In some mathematical sense, that could be seen as an early example of an AI trying to break out of a box in order to try to maximize its future freedom of action,” he told us.

The Cognitive Niche

Needless to say, Wissner-Gross’s idea is also connected to biological evolution and the emergence of intelligence. He points to the cognitive niche theory, which suggests that there is an ecological niche in any given dynamic biosphere for an organism that’s able to think quickly and adapt. But this adaptation would have to happen on much faster time scales than normal evolution.

“There’s a certain gap in adaptation space that evolution doesn’t fill, where complex — but computable — environmental changes occur on a time scale too fast for natural evolution to adapt to,” he says, “This so-called cognitive niche is a hole that only intelligent organisms can fill.”

Darwinian evolution in such dynamic environments, he argues, when given enough time, should eventually produce organisms that are capable, through internal strategic modeling of their environment, of adapting on much faster time scales than their own generation times.

Consequently, Wissner-Gross’s results can be seen as providing an explicit demonstration that the cognitive niche theory can inspire intelligent behavior based on pure thermodynamics.

A New Approach to Generating Artificial Superintelligence

As noted, Wissner-Gross’s work has serious implications for AI. And in fact, he says it turns conventional notions of a world-dominating artificial intelligence on its head.

“It has long been implicitly speculated that at some point in the future we will develop an ultrapowerful computer and that it will pass some critical threshold of intelligence, and then after passing that threshold it will suddenly turn megalomaniacal and try to take over the world,” he said.

No doubt, this general assumption has been the premise for a lot of science fiction, ranging from Colossus: The Forbin Project and 2001: A Space Odyssey, through to the Terminator films and The Matrix.

“The conventional storyline,” he says, “has been that we would first build a really intelligent machine, and then it would spontaneously decide to take over the world.”

But one of the key implications of Wissner-Gross’s paper is that this long-held assumption may be completely backwards — that the process of trying to take over the world may actually be a more fundamental precursor to intelligence, and not vice versa.

“We may have gotten the order of dependence all wrong,” he argues. “Intelligence and superintelligence may actually emerge from the effort of trying to take control of the world — and specifically, all possible futures — rather than taking control of the world being a behavior that spontaneously emerges from having superhuman machine intelligence.”

Instead, says Wissner-Gross, from the rather simple thermodynamic process of trying to seize control of as many potential future histories as possible, intelligent behavior may fall out immediately.

Seizing Future Histories

Indeed, the idea that intelligent behavior emerges as an effort to keep future options open is an intriguing one. I asked Wissner-Gross to elaborate on this point.

“Think of games like chess or Go,” he said, “in which good players try to preserve as much freedom of action as possible.”

The game of Go in particular, he says, is an excellent case study.

“When the best computer programs play Go, they rely on a principle in which the best move is the one which preserves the greatest fraction of possible wins,” he says. “When computers are equipped with this simple strategy — along with some pruning for efficiency — they begin to approach the level of Go grandmasters.” And they do this by sampling possible future paths.

A fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune series, Wissner-Gross drew another analogy for me, but this time to the character of Paul Atreides who, after ingesting the spice melange and becoming the Kwisatz Haderach, could see all possible futures and hence choose from them, enabling him to become a galactic god.

Moreover, the series’ theme of humanity learning the importance of not allowing itself to become beholden to a single controlling interest by keeping its futures as open as possible resonates deeply with Wissner-Gross’ new theory.

Recursive Self-Improvement

Returning to the issue of superintelligent AI, I asked Wissner-Gross about the frightening prospect of recursive self-improvement — the notion that a self-scripting AI could iteratively and unilaterally decide to continually improve upon itself. He believes the prospect is possible, and that it would be consistent with his theory.

“The recursive self-improving of an AI can be seen as implicitly inducing a flow over the entire space of possible AI programs,” he says. “In that context, if you look at that flow over AI program space, it is conceivable that causal entropy maximization might represent a fixed point and that a recursively self-improving AI will tend to self-modify so as to do a better and better job of maximizing its future possibilities.”

Is Causal Entropy Maximization Friendly?

So how friendly would an artificial superintelligence that maximizes causal entropy be?

“Good question,” he responded, “we don’t yet have a universal answer to that.” But he suggests that the financial industry may provide some clues.

“Quantitative finance is an interesting model for the friendliness question because, in a volume sense, it has already been turned over to (specialized) superhuman intelligences,” he told io9. Wissner-Gross previously discussed issues surrounding financial AI in a talk he gave at the 2011 Singularity Summit.

Now that these advanced systems exist, they’ve been observed to compete with each other for scarce resources, and — especially at high frequencies — they appear to have become somewhat apathetic to human economies. They’ve decoupled themselves from the human economy because events that happen on slower human time scales — what might be called market “fundamentals” — have little to no relevance to their own success.

But Wissner-Gross cautioned that zero-sum competition between artificial agents is not inevitable, and that it depends on the details of the system.

“In the problem solving example, I show that cooperation can emerge as a means for the systems to maximize their causal entropy, so it doesn’t always have to be competition,” he says. “If more future possibilities are gained through cooperation rather than competition, then cooperation by itself should spontaneously emerge, speaking to the potential for friendliness.”

Attempting to Contain AIs

We also discussed the so-called boxing problem — the fear that we won’t be able to contain an AI once it gets smart enough. Wissner-Gross argues that the problem of boxing may actually turn out to be much more fundamental to AI than it has been previously assumed.

“Our causal entropy maximization theory predicts that AIs may be fundamentally antithetical to being boxed,” he says. “If intelligence is a phenomenon that spontaneously emerges through causal entropy maximization, then it might mean that you could effectively reframe the entire definition of Artificial General Intelligence to be a physical effect resulting from a process that tries to avoid being boxed.”

Which is quite frightening when you think about it.

Read the entire paper: A. D. Wissner-Gross, et al., “Causal Entropic Forces,” Physical Review Letters 110, 168702 (2013).

No, this isn't a screenshot from the latest incarnation of BioShock —it's DeviantArt user LaynesLionRedCat cosplaying as quantum physicist Rosalind Lutece. Wow.

Images via LaynesLionRedCat.

From the actual gameplay:

And the cosplay versions:

More BioShock cosplay via Kotaku.

H/t Geeks Are Sexy.

By using a nano-sized 3D array, scientists have created "smart skin" that accurately mimics the sense of touch. It could eventually be used in robotics, human-computer interfaces, and advanced prosthetic devices.

To make it work, a research team led by Zong Lin Wang from Georgia Tech built tiny arrays made up of around 8,000 transistors. These transistors were bundled together with nanoscale crystals of zinc oxide, a semiconducting material.

Called taxels, these transistors have piezoelectric properties, which means they can independently produce electronic signals when subjected to mechanical force, like touch.

Indeed the smart skin exhibits a sensitivity comparable to that of a human fingertip. The breakthrough is a 15-fold improvement in sensor density and spatial resolution compared to previous approaches. High-resolution images also showed a dramatic improvement in sensitivity — about two to three times better than previous efforts.

One limitation of the technique is that it only works in materials that have both piezoelectric and semiconducting properties. What’s more, the researchers need to integrate the smart skin into a system that can interpret the signals and respond accordingly.

But once these challenges are met, the technology could endow robots and assistive devices with a human-like sense of touch.

Read the entire study at Science: “Taxel-Addressable Matrix of Vertical-Nanowire Piezotronic Transistors for Active/Adaptive Tactile Imaging.”

Image: Georgia Tech.