On the road to spaceships…Episode 7

Science that got my attention, July 2013

The more that I read science news headlines, the more that I notice specific trends in the research that’s being published. Maybe trends is the wrong word. I think the word I’m looking for is theme – a handful of themes seem to occupy most of the publication space.

For instance, each month I take note of a veritable slew of headlines related to our ongoing quest to cure cancer once and for all, and to properly understand and treat (and, eventually, prevent) Alzheimer’s and other types of mental degeneration. This isn’t surprising. It’s human nature to keep looking for ways to extend the quality and quantity of our lives. Sometimes I report on findings from this theme on this website. Mostly, though, I figure that the really big cancer or Alzheimer’s breakthroughs will be picked up by the mainstream news.

One emerging theme I have been keeping an eye on concerns agriculture. Specifically, how agricultural practices and crop yields are being affected by climate variability, climate change and population pressure, and what sorts of management changes might be necessary to weather the storms (literal and figurative) ahead. I think that I might have do a special themed issue dedicated to agriculture in the near future, because these articles are worthy of broader recognition that’s not happening in the public media space. I’ll let you know how that develops, dear readers!

In the meantime, I prefer to focus on lesser-known science in these monthly articles – the discoveries that are likely to fly under the radar, or that are particularly eye-catching for an unusual reason.

A forgotten, 1,260-meter seawall buried beneath the beach helped Bay Head weather Sandy’s record storm surges and large waves over multiple high tides. Image credit: Jennifer Irish/Virginia Tech.

In that vein, this month I present to you:

A long-forgotten seawall buried beneath the beach at Bay Head, in New Jersey, made all the difference when it came to protecting nearby residents from Hurricane Sandy.

In this article, researchers show how the Bay Head seawall – built nearly 150 years ago – lessened the impacts of waves and storm surges generated by the hurricane, cutting the forces on ocean-front structures in half.

The researchers noted, “The beach and dunes did their job to a certain point, then the seawall took over, providing significant dampening of the waves. It was the difference between houses that were flooded in Bay Head and houses that were reduced to piles of rubble in Mantoloking [a neighboring community].”

The take-home message from this work is that we need to plan our coastal communities more carefully to buffer against future large storms, which unfortunately are more likely than not. The lead author, Jennifer Irish, said, “It will have little solace, but we are left with a clear, unintentional example of the need for multiple levels of defense that include hard structures and beach nourishment to protect coastal communities.“

In more hopeful disaster-related news, the US Geological Survey (USGS) and other institutions are learning valuable new information about earthquakes thanks to social media and crowdsourcing, an effort being called citizen seismology. [A quick aside: take a minute to check out this hilarious xkcd comic about social media, if you haven’t already.]

The USGS maintains the website Did you feel it? (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/dyfi/), where citizens can upload information about local earthquakes to a centralized database.

The report notes the following benefits of citizen seismology:

“…the USGS has shown that citizen seismology can supplement three of their goals: rapid detection, information gathering for emergency response, and information dissemination. Scientists have had great success both at using automated tools to quickly find earthquake information that citizens are already posting on the Web and at providing citizens with interactive tools that they can use to provide more detailed information about their earthquake experiences. Just as important, these same tools can be used to send information to citizens during disasters so that those citizens can better respond to dangerous situations.”

Although the USGS and other agencies internationally monitor a network of seismometers, the network doesn’t have the same density across the globe or even within the US, and those little wavy scratchings on paper don’t reveal anything about the human impact of a quake – how vulnerable a community might be to the Earth’s shaking, and therefore how desperate the situation might be. These are instances in which citizen seismology could potentially be the most valuable: filling in gaps in the monitoring network, and providing time-critical information about the human side of a quake.

The Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) backbone, the core of the US Seismic National Network. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/monitoring/anss/backbone.php

As an example of the potential power of citizen seismology, the report authors cite the case of a 7.9 earthquake that struck the city of Wenchuan, China, on March 12, 2008. This was the most devastating earthquake to hit China since 1976, leaving 87,000 people dead or missing. Individual citizens using social networking tools on the internet were the first to send alerts about the quake, before the USGS, CNN or any national response.

Although information volunteered by a citizen scientist has to be carefully screened before it can be put to any rigorous scientific use, examples like Wenchuan show that twitter and other forms of social media could have great value as an early warning system. Yay for citizen science!

Finally, something a little bit different: in addition to taking your fingerprints or using facial recognition software on your photo, biometrics in the future could be looking under your skin at the blood flowing through your veins. Literally.

Routine biometrics already include iris scans and fingerprinting. In the future, that could expand to include maps of the blood vessels in your face.

A new development in biometrics technology uses thermal imaging to map the network of blood vessels in your face. Apparently everyone’s blood vessel pattern is unique, like a fingerprint or iris. The method would be foolproof because the thermal imager would see through any attempted mask to register the blood vessels underneath, unmasking the imposter (that’s the press release’s pun, not mine). As if I didn’t already feel like I was handing over a DNA sample every time I enter US immigration.

Until next month, dear readers, let the pursuit for personal spaceships continue…

Missed what happened last month? Catch up on June’s pursuit.

Of course, a lot more happened lately in the world of science than the stories I’ve talked about here. Good places to go if you’re keen for updates on a daily or weekly basis are EurekAlert! and ScienceDaily.