"First Contact With Inner Earth": Drillers Strike Magma

A drilling crew recently cracked through rock layers deep beneath Hawaii and accidentally became the first humans known to have drilled into magma—the melted form of rock that sometimes erupts to the surface as lava—in its natural environment, scientists announced this week.

"This is an unprecedented discovery," said Bruce Marsh, a volcanologist from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, who will be studying the find.

Normally, he said, volcanologists have to do "postmortem studies" of long-solidified magmas or study active lava during volcanic eruptions. But this time they'd found magma in its natural environment—something Marsh described as nearly as exciting as a paleontologist finding a dinosaur frolicking on a remote island.

"This is my Jurassic Park," he said at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Magnetic-Shield Cracks Found; Big Solar Storms Expected

An unexpected, thick layer of solar particles inside Earth's magnetic field suggests there are huge breaches in our planet's solar defenses, scientists said. These breaches indicate that during the next period of high solar activity, due to start in 2012, Earth will experience some of the worst solar storms seen in decades.

Solar winds—charged particles from the sun—help create auroras, the brightly colored lights that sometimes appear above the Earth's poles.

But the winds also trigger storms that can interfere with satellites' power sources, endanger spacewalkers, and even knock out power grids on Earth.

"The sequence we're expecting … is just right to put particles in and energize them to create the biggest geomagnetic storms, the brightest auroras, the biggest disturbances in Earth's radiation belts," said David Sibeck, a space-weather expert at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

"So if all of this is true, it should be that we're in for a tough time in the next 11 years."

(Related: "Sun's Power Hits New Low, May Endanger Earth?" [September 24, 2008].)

Wii-Controlled Robots Made for Combat

Dec. 19, 2008 -- For kids, a new way to control virtual characters is all fun and games. For soldiers, more intuitive controls for robots could mean the difference between life and death.

Using the controller from the popular Nintendo Wii gaming system (the "Wiimote") scientists from the Idaho National Laboratory, working with engineers from the U.S. Army, Foster-Miller, and iRobot, are developing novel ways to control military robots.

"If a soldier wants to find a bomb [with a robot], 95 percent of their attention has to be focused on the screen," said Doug Few, an engineer at the Idaho National Laboratory working on the project. "Using the Wii remote reduces the work load on the operator and also extends the numbers of domains that the robot can be used in."

The current laptop interface that controls the military robots can have up to 50 hard buttons and requires a soldier to place all attention to the monitor, a potentially deadly distraction in a war zone.

The white, Snickers-sized Wiimote is more intuitive, say the researchers, as evidenced by its popularity among gamers.

The Wiimote is equipped with buttons, an infrared beam and accelerometers. A player can point it at the television screen to aim and fire at objects like a gun, or swing it to play games like virtual tennis.

"It's very easy to drive the robot with the Wiimote," said Slater.

Few and his colleagues at the INL have modified the Wiimote so they can drive a military robot. Using the infrared beam, they can point to a specific place, and the robot, using an artificial intelligence system, will find its own way to that point.

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Giving Fish A Bath?

December 19, 2008—Biologists literally give fish a bath to try and eliminate parasites in the sea near a coral reef in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Cleaning Fish Video

Is Head Banging Bad for the Brain?

Dec. 18, 2008 -- Led Zeppelin's immortal song 'Dazed and Confused' might well have been a clinical observation on the state of their audience's brains, say Australian researchers who have found over-enthusiastic head-banging can cause mild brain injury.

In a study published in the British Medical Journal this week, two University of New South Wales (UNSW) researchers concluded that head-banging to a typical heavy metal tempo could cause mild traumatic brain injury or concussion, and neck injury, particularly as the tempo of the music and angle of movement increased.

"Clearly it's a serious issue," said Associate Professor Andrew McIntosh, co-author and professor of biomechanics at UNSW.

"If you observe people after concerts they clearly look dazed, confused and incoherent, so something must be going on and we wanted to look into it."

After careful observation of the behavior of heavy metal concert-goers, McIntosh and honors student Declan Patton constructed a theoretical head-banging model to better understand the mechanics of the practice.

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They also spoke to a focus group of local musicians to identify ten popular songs to head-bang to.

"These songs had an average tempo of 146 beats per minute, and at this tempo we predict that head banging can cause headaches and dizziness if the range of movement of the head and neck is greater than 75 degrees," the researchers wrote.

Several songs were selected as controls against which to compare the risk of heavy metal head-banging, including Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You."

But McIntosh says attempts to find control cases of head-banging at alternative venues, such as Andre Rieu concerts, were unsuccessful.

Unfortunately for McIntosh, who confesses to not being a heavy metal fan, the research involved attending several heavy metal concerts of bands including Motley Crue, Ozzy Osbourne and Motorhead to identify the most popular head-banging techniques and better understand the biomechanics of the movement.

Despite being an observational study only, McIntosh says there were considerable occupational health and safety issues involved for researchers, including the risk of hearing damage, and the potential adverse outcomes of dealing with excited patrons who may have been "under the influence of things".

Professor McIntosh, whose research focuses on the biomechanics of head injury and concussion, says this type of temporary, mild brain injury was generally poorly understood, but was unlikely to lead to any more serious symptoms than headaches and dizziness.

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