Japan Earthquake 2011

I've lived in Tokyo on and off for about six years and this is definitely the strongest quake I've ever felt. And the longest--the ground must have been shaking for at least 5 minutes.

I had the day off because we were bringing my son to an orientation session for his daycare, which he will start next month. We were in the middle of it when the quake started. Needless to say, that got cut short. My son (who is 2) didn't really understand what was happening but he was quite shaken. I saw cars outside bouncing around on their suspension. After the quake subsided, we went to a big park, the safest thing to do. We waited out a couple of aftershocks then headed home. On the way back, the only damage I saw was a tipped-over flower pot. In our apartment, only a few things were knocked over. (See pic of what happened to my English-language books!) We didn't know the full extent of the damage until we turned on the news. Even now, we are still having aftershocks.

All stores and restaurants closed. The only place we found open was a 7-11, and they were completely out of bread, bottled water, and prepared meals. The trains were stopped and people had to find an alternate means to get home from work. Many people walked.

Our power never went out, but the gas was off this morning. It's back on now.

We were particularly worried about my father-in-law, who lives in a coastal area. We finally heard from him this morning. While he is without power, he is fine. All family members are now accounted for.

Do We Really Need Daylight Savings Time?

The clocks are about to change again. But is Daylight Savings Time really necessary? I now live in Japan, and we don't use change the clocks here. I thought it was strange at first, but it turns out much of the world doesn't use DST.

Have you ever wondered how DST was started? According to Wikipedia, modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson, whose shift-work job gave him leisure time to collect insects, and made him aware of the value of after-hours daylight.

So, essentially, we continue to use DST to this day because some guy liked collecting bugs over 100 years ago. Are there really any benefits to this practice or is it just an annoyance? It was written into law to save energy…but the trade off is that people might use less energy for lighting, but they'll use more for their air conditioners during that extra hour.

Read more about the history and controversy of DST here.

Shrimp Found Living under Antarctic Ice Sheet

Who would have thought that life could thrive underneath an Antarctic ice sheet? Not NASA.

Six hundred feet below the ice where no light shines, scientists had figured nothing much more than a few microbes could exist.

That's why a NASA team was surprised when they lowered a video camera to get the first long look at the underbelly of an ice sheet in Antarctica. A curious shrimp-like creature came swimming by and then parked itself on the camera's cable. Scientists also pulled up a tentacle they believe came from a foot-long jellyfish.

If life can exist in such an inhospitable environment on Earth, we can imagine it can exist nearly anywhere...the sands of Mars, the seas of Europa, the skies of Jupiter...maybe even more exotic locales such as the hydrocarbon oceans of Titan or the surface of Pluto.

Thoughts?

Click here for more info on this amazing discovery.

Do Lawns Contribute to Global Warming?

A new study from UC Irvine suggests lawns may contribute to global warming. How could this be? Grass is green, right? It will soak up CO2, right?

Well, it's not so much the grass -- which does remove CO2 from the air and store carbon in the soil -- but the care that the lawn needs: applying fertilizer, mowing, irrigation, leaf blowing, etc., all of which produce emissions (four times greater than the amount of carbon stored).

You may think this sounds strange...doesn't everyone have a lawn? Could you imagine a house without one? Lawns may in fact be just a Western cultural phenomenon. I remember my wife (who is from Japan) once asked me why all American houses have lawns. Japanese houses don't have lawns, and I'm not just talking about Tokyo. Even out in the country, there is no sign of a layer of green grass, a ride-on lawn mower, etc. The idea of lawns just never took root (ugh, bad pun) here. Could you imagine what your home would be like without a lawn?

Read more here and here.

Recycle that Junk Mail!

I just saw this article and had to laugh. According to USA Today, the U.S. Postal Service may seem so last century, burning fossil fuel to deliver paper mail, but it's increasingly going green. Its latest endeavor: more lobby recycling bins.

It's adding these bins to encourage customers to "read, respond, recycle" their P.O. box mail while still in the post office lobby, instead of throwing the paper away at home.

What's all this about "reading" and "responding?" Last time I checked, the only things I ever get in the mail are bills (and I'm switching to paperless whenever possible) and ads for credit cards I don't need, lame catalogs for junk I don't want, and sneaky frequent flyer mile offers that are just more cleverly disguised credit card ads. I never even open any of this trash. It goes straight into the recycling bin! There should be a "do not mail" list, the same way there's a "do not call" list for telephone solicitations.

Read more about it here.

Dinochicken Project

I've posted on this blog before about the link between dinosaurs and birds--birds are technically classified as a surviving branch of theropod dinosaurs. Now, paleontologists are planning to reverse-engineer a chicken into a "non-avian" dinosaur. (You have to call "regular" dinosaurs "non-avian" to differentiate them from birds!)

According to Discovery.com, they'll start off with a chicken embryo. The dinochicken project has the goal of bringing back multiple dinosaur characteristics, such as a tail, teeth and forearms, by changing the levels of regulatory proteins that have evolved to suppress these characteristics in birds.

And before you start screaming "abomination," they say that there is no danger of the proposed dinochicken escaping and populating the world with dinosaurs, Horner said, since only the chicken's development, and not its genome, would have been affected. If the creature did somehow escape and could mate, the result would just be a regular chicken.

Essentially, they'll be re-awakening dinosaur genes in the chicken that modern chickens no longer use. I wonder what this "chickenosaurs" will end up looking like?

Read more about it here.

See the video here.

Pre-historic Hominids=Time Travelling Aliens?

Discover Magazine reports on a finding of a possible hominid species from the town of Boskop in South Africa that could've had an average IQ of around 150--meaning they would've been much more intelligent than us!

What I find interesting, however, is the description of the faces of these hominids:

These people had small, childlike faces.

The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to “alien abductors” in movies.

Were they alien time travelers, perhaps? Of course, we have no way to prove anything like this but it's always fun to speculate.

Read more about it here.