Increase in Helium Detected Near Epicenters

 Phys.org published an article about a groundbreaking Japanese study that suggests an increase in groundwater helium levels mean an earthquake is imminent.  While this is only a preliminary study it could lead to more research that verifies it as factual.  If it does prove to be true, then I would wonder if animals can sense this helium shift after drinking water. 

Thousands of people have been known to report their pets acting strangely in the days leading up to an earthquake.  If these animals are drinking from natural groundwater, they may be better able to detect the helium shift, thereby anticipating the coming of an earthquake from past experience.  The article states that the shift is stronger in areas closer to epicenters, so if more reports are coming in about strange animal behavior near them, there may be a correlation.  Hopefully any future studies will include this hypothesis. 

This is tremendous news for the field of seismology.  In the future, they may be able to predict earthquakes by using helium sensors in local groundwater and monitoring any sudden changes.  They'd be able to do this by generating maps of helium content all over a country (like Japan) the same way something like radar finds rain on a weather map, i.e., remote sensing.  If a large portion of helium is concentrated in a localized area, they could forecast it as being the epicenter of a possible earthquake.  Technology like this would save companies billions of dollars in damage control, not to mention the countless lives that could be spared. 

Constellation Clues: Fun Facts and Quiz

Want to know some deep sky phenomena that can be found in constellations?  Play my quiz Constellation Clues!  Interesting facts from the quiz are below:

1. Dorado, the "dolphinfish", is a southern constellation with many deep-sky objects.  It hosts the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, and the Tarantula Nebula within.  In 2016, the Tarantula Nebula was known to be the largest region of star formation in the local group of galaxies, and one of the few that were capable of being seen outside the Milky Way.  Supernova 1987A occurred on the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in 1987.  Despite being outside our galaxy, it was the brightest supernova seen in nearly 400 years.

2. Better known as the Southern Cross, Crux is one of the most famous constellations in the southern hemisphere.  The Jewel Box is an open cluster of stars that resembles fancy jewelry.  The Coalsack is an ominous dark nebula that obscures the stars behind it.  Acrux, or Alpha Crucis, is a multiple star system that marks the bottom of the cross.  It ranks 13th among brightest stars, making it the southernmost of first-magnitude stars (20 brightest stars in the night sky).  

3. Carina has a large number of star clusters and nebulae because the Milky Way runs through it.  Canopus is a supergiant that is the second brightest star in the sky, after Sirius.  Mystic Mountain in the Carina Nebula is a striking cloud of dust containing many newborn stars that are firing off jets of gas.  The Bullet Cluster shows two colliding clusters of galaxies that are 4 billion light years away.  Its gravitational lensing provides some of the best evidence for the existence of dark matter.  

4. Since the center of the Milky Way lies in Sagittarius, the constellation has a very active region of star clusters and nebulae.  The famous Lagoon Nebula is a pink-hued emission nebula.  Others worth noting are the bright Omega Nebula, and Trifid, which has a dust cloud resembling a unicorn.  The Teapot is an asterism in the constellation- a play on the Milky Way having the appearance of steam coming out of its top.

5. Orion is one of the easiest constellations to find because it has two of the brightest stars in the sky: Betelgeuse and Rigel.  Betelgeuse is a red supergiant that is expected to explode into a supernova sometime in the relatively near future.  Rigel is a blue-white supergiant representing the foot of Orion.  The Horsehead Nebula is a dark nebula that creates the silhouette of, you guessed it, a horse's head.

6. Constellation Taurus features Aldebaran, the Pleiades, Crab Nebula. Sometimes referred to as "the fiery eye of Taurus the bull", Aldebaran is an orange giant burning 65 million light years away.  The Pleidaes are an open cluster of seven stars that are hot, blue, and extremely luminous.  The Crab Nebula contains the remnants of a supernova that was first observed in 1054 A.D.  At its center, the Crab Pulsar is a neutron star that is only 30 km across, yet spins at a rate of 30 times per second and blasts out enormous amounts of radiation.  It's probably the most terrifying thing in our little corner of space.

7. Also known as the "Northern Cross", constellation Cygnus contains Deneb, a blue-white supergiant that shines at the top of the cross.  Due to the precession of the equinoxes, Deneb will replace Polaris as the pole star in about 8,000 years.  The Vela Nebula contains the wispy remnants of a supernova that is thought to have exploded anywhere from 3000 BC to 6000 BC.  Cygnus X-1 is part of a high-mass binary system that is generating enormous amounts of x-rays.  The system includes a blue supergiant whose mass is being sucked in by a neighboring black hole - as if the neutron star wasn't terrifying enough.

8. Constellation Lyra contains Vega, the Ring Nebula, and Double Double. Vega is the fifth brightest star in the sky and only 25 light years from Earth.  The Ring Nebula is a planetary nebula that resulted when a red giant passed into the final stage of its life before becoming a white dwarf.  Epsilon Lyrae, also known as the Double Double, is a star system that has a pair of binary stars that are revolving around each other.  One pair is circling around the other pair, creating a center of gravity between four different stars.

9. Draco "the dragon" is a large northern constellation.  Due to the precession of the equinoxes, Thuban was the pole star prior to Polaris being the current one.  Cat's Eye Nebula is a young planetary nebula, owing its strange appearance to the gravity of a multiple star system at its center.  The cause for the Tadpole Galaxy's long trail of stellar material is thought to be from a near collision with another galaxy, not from a frog egg.

10. Famous for its galaxy of the same name, the Andromeda constellation covers a large portion of the northern sky.  Alpheratz, its brightest star, is actually a binary system whose brighter star has a rare atmosphere composed of elements like mercury, manganese, and xenon, causing it to spin a lot slower than other stars.  The Blue Snowball Nebula is appropriately named for its color.  Finally, not only is Andromeda the closest spiral galaxy, but it is the farthest thing in the universe that can be seen with the unaided eye.  In fact on a dark night with clear enough air, it would appear to occupy more space than the moon does.

All rights belong to FunTrivia.com

The Use of Martyrdom in Early Christianity

 There's a certain quality about Christians that makes them reach out to others and try to lure them into their faith.  In all my life, and I'm sure this is true for millions of others, no other social group has approached me and invited me to attend their services more than the Christians have, which is pretty surprising given the rampant number of solicitations in our society.  The denomination hardly matters either; Baptists, Jehovah's Witness, and Mormons have all tried to persuade me.  They are like the mightiest of corporate entities, relentless in their pursuit of profiting from our attention, seductively influential in their appeal to our moral needs. 

Since they aren't trying to sell us anything (though they are trying to get us to pay their churches!), where does this quality come from?  Since the dawn of this religion, missionaries have arrogantly stepped beyond the bounds of respect for alternate faiths and imposed their beliefs on others.  It's as though the very first of them- Paul of Tarsus, Peter, and the rest Jesus' disciples- set the example by creating a manifesto that condemned any alternate faiths and philosophies, ignoring anyone who challenged the word of their God with that of their own, or any of the voices of reason in scientific communities.  To this day their zealotry has magnified through the centuries and their words have been spread to the farthest corners of the globe.  They may be a dying race, but what quality in a dying race still makes them try as hard as they can to gather followers? 

The answer is martyrdom. The feeling of sacrifice. The superstition that something is so much greater than their meaningless lives that they offer their minds, bodies, and souls to it without retaining a shred of individuality.  The goal for them is to become one with the world, in peace and in love, like Jesus, although a great many of them never reach this state.  The first-century Christians were so willing to give their lives for a cause that was intangible and beyond them, that every martyr who stood for them only added to the divine impression this faith gave to others.  For if they wanted to be like Jesus, they had to give up their lives like he did, turning a blind eye to those in control and convincing themselves of a justified suicide.  A suicide for the people.  And this is why Christians are among the most susceptible to cult suicides; the sins of the world are too great for them.  There is too much suffering, so they try to deter it by making examples of themselves.  The problem with this line of reasoning is that martyrdom never solves anything, it only manages to get rid of good people who could have solved the problems of society in more practical ways. 

Christian martyrdom helped begin an age of darkness where ignorance prevailed and fear was the emperor of the passions.  The millennium of Christ that St. Augustine predicted really did happen, though not in the way he envisioned.  The fear, wonder, and revelry that the story of Christ inflicted upon people was as much an agent of control as it was a moral code for people to live by.  They were able to sustain such an influence because of the blood of their martyrs, who died during the turbulence of early Christianity.  Without their sacrifices the faith wouldn't have expanded as far as it did, because nothing spreads fear and wonder the way a public execution does.  This lazy succumbing of the spirit to the doctrines of faith made society incredibly weak and at the mercy of anarchists.  Justice, art, and progress were locked in the shackles of medieval exile.  The gothic invaders broke the structure of civilization, but they couldn't have done it so easily if it weren't for the weakness of a faith that clouded the senses. The loss of Rome itself was like a collective martyrdom, as people seemed to give up on the greatest empire that ever existed just as Christianity was reaching its widest audience.  Byzantium, Rome's twin in the east after the empire was split up, didn't suffer the same fate because it wasn't attacked as viciously.  Even then, the size of Byzantium seemed to shrink the more it was Christianized. 

It's important to point out that the spread of Christianity wasn't the only cause of Rome's demise.  You won't find any historian claiming such an absurd thing.  Rather what I'm trying to say, as Edward Gibbons did in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was that it was only a contribution and not the sole reason.  Also: this is not an attack on Christianity, it is a rejection of missionaries and martyrs, not just in the Christian faith but in others as well.  If your faith really were the best one, people would flock to it naturally and you wouldn't need to send people out to convince them it's the best.  The way they manipulated people into believing in Jesus, regardless of how great he was, was a major obstacle in the history of intellectualism.  It saddens me that this faith was thrust upon so many people in so many different parts of the globe.  Rather than keeping old gods by their side and entering the modern world with their faiths intact, the victims of Christianization were forced to replace them with the one God through the power of a very sad story. 

Salome, Oscar Wilde

A classic "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" story. What's especially provoking is that the victim is based on the fate of John the Baptist. As you can imagine, it caused an uproar of controversy in the 1890s, yet still managed to be translated many times. 

Oscar Wilde subdued his famous wit in Salome and experimented with poetry and passion instead. It worked like a charm- I was thoroughly enthralled by this dramatic play. 

The Election of Donald Trump

Dear America, 

 
    I understand why you did it.  You suspected something wasn't quite right with our political institution, and that something needed to be changed in Washington.  You wanted a refreshing voice that spoke against corruption and promised to change the landscape there, someone you could trust in, someone who wouldn't take no for an answer.  You thought you found him when the first billionaire who matched this description told you what he would do.  Now you have divided the country even more by electing someone as far right as you can get.  There isn't any difference between the person you elected and a far-right Republican.  He will tell you that he was against the war in Iraq, but that was a lie, like a lot of the other things he said.  He will tell you he's going to make America great again and change Washington, but he won't, just like every politician before him.  You put your trust in the hands of a man who used the same political maneuvers that his predecessors had.  He doesn't "tell it like it is", and he is painfully dishonest; he only seems honest because we are so stunned that anyone with a political agenda could say the things he has, such as "the election will be rigged", "Obama founded ISIS", and a great number of insulting comments about women and his opposition.  But it's not an illusion.  He really is so bigoted, misogynistic, full of himself, etc., that you mistook honesty for savagery.  He got as far as he did because he was an entertainer, not someone experienced in foreign-policy, economics, education, basic manners like humbly accepting defeat, or any of the other things you need in order to be president.  What happens when he tries to play his tricks on insidious foreign leaders, like Vladimir Putin?  Did you ever stop to think of that, America? 

Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

If the results of the 2016 election are any indication, racism is still a relevant issue in our country. Though few will admit it, having a black president in the White House horrified many people for a very superficial reason: the simple fact that he was black. For this reason, I decided to pick up Ta-Nehisi Coates' modern classic, Between the World and Me, just to get a sense of the mindset of black America in post-segregation society. 

Written as a series of letters to his son, Coates provides a wonderfully written catalog of experiences that highlight his fight for social justice as a student and journalist. Wisely he avoids crossing the thin line between whiney and provocative. His insights show few traces of anger and serve more as a beacon for hope against police brutality, incarceration, and any reversions to pre-1960s social norms. He uses the American Dream as a platform for white suburbia's rejection of the slums, using references to the black body to prove his point. The black body has been beaten black and blue in white America's efforts to keep segregation a reality, despite all the civil rights laws that were passed to try and eradicate it. 

He is spot on. I grew up in the suburbs, and only one black kid went to our school. Any notion that our races have been united is an illusion. Though we may be slightly more tolerant, the laws haven't done enough to erase the memory of our bleak past. We are reaching a dangerous point in American history, similar to the time when Rome feasted so much on its glory that it reverted to vilifying social groups as scapegoats for its inner turmoil. We should know better than that, but we clearly don't. 

Wind, Sand, and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

    This is a really great memoire-anthology on Saint-Exupery's experiences as a pilot. They aren't plain experiences either; he flew through a storm over the Andes, and nearly died of starvation after crashing his plane into the Sahara Desert. Not only that, but he spices up his memories with a lot of reflective thoughts on the condition of man, which are often poetically pleasing. These are all things I enjoy when reading, and in addition to my interest in flying it seemed the perfect combination of style, atmosphere, and subject matter. I'm glad I chose to read it on my flight to Europe; it's the perfect book to read on a plane.