Linketies: Science Friday

[dimensionm]

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  History has many tales of mysterious places and lost islands, the most famous of these being the lost city of Atlantis. The era of Google Earth has given us a new twist on the theme. An island shown on Google Earth and in world coastline databases as being in the middle of the Coral Sea off the coast of Australia was never really there after all. Since the area is essentially in "the middle of nowhere" and far from major shipping lanes, no one ever noticed.
  


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  There are no shortage of ways in which human civilization could come to an end. While mass extinctions and falling civilizations don't happen every Tuesday, they do happen. Civilizations and even species rise and fall with the ebb and flow of history. In humanity's case, an uncomfortable number of ways that our civilization could go poof involve scientific and technological menaces of our own creation, such as climate change, the "grey goo" nightmare of nanotechnology, scary genetic engineering scenarios, and robot uprisings. In light of these potential threats, researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK are establishing a new Centre for Existential Risk [website: CSER.org] to study extinction-level risks caused by developments in human technology.
  


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  Fans of classic video games will appreciate photos from NASA's Cassini spacecraft of Saturn's moons Mimas and Tethys whose infrared signatures invoke memories of Pac-Man.
  


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  In an interesting example of how life seems to always find a way, scientists have discovered microbes thriving in a frozen salty lake in Antarctica. Scientists suspect the microbes are sustained by energy produced in chemical reactions in the highly salty environment. The discovery raises the possibility of a new way to think about the possibility of life in "inhospitable" environments -- for example, some of the outer solar system's icy moons.
  


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  Another NASA spacecraft, Messenger, has discovered convincing indications that the north pole of hellish Mercury may contain up to 100 billion tons of water ice along with hydrocarbons such as methane.
  


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  Results of a computer simulation, recently published in the journal Nature's Scientific Reports, raise the question of whether there is an undiscovered natural law that governs things as diverse as the expansion of the Internet and the expansion of the universe. Of course, it is becoming increasingly trendy in the scientific community to speculate on whether the universe itself is some kind of simulation.