When a seismic network failed, citizen science stepped in

The Raspberry Shake, a simple seismograph based on Raspberry Pi hardware.

Enlarge / The Raspberry Shake, a simple seismograph based on Raspberry Pi hardware. (credit: Mike Hotchkiss, Raspberry Shake)

On the afternoon of January 12, 2010, a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck about 16 miles west of Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince. Among the most significant seismic disasters recorded, more than 100,000 people lost their lives. The damage—costing billions of dollars—rendered more than a million people homeless and destroyed much of the region’s infrastructure. The earth tore at the relatively shallow depth of about 8 miles, toppling poorly constructed buildings.

At the time, Haiti had no national seismic network. After the devastating event, scientists installed expensive seismic stations around the country, but that instrumentation requires funding, care, and expertise; today, those stations are no longer functional. In 2019, seismologists opted to try something different and far less expensive—citizen seismology via Raspberry Shakes.

On the morning of August 14, 2021, amidst a summer of COVID-19 lockdowns and political unrest, another earthquake struck, providing the opportunity to test just how useful these Raspberry-pi powered devices could be. In a paper published on Thursday in Science, researchers described using the Raspberry Shake data to demonstrate that this citizen science network successfully monitored both the mainshock and subsequent aftershocks and provided data integral to untangling what turned out to be a less-than-simple rending of the earth.

Read 23 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Why Werner Herzog thinks human space colonization “will inevitably fail”

Last Exit: Space is a new documentary on Discovery+ that explores the possibility of humans colonizing planets beyond Earth. Since it is produced and narrated by Werner Herzog (director of Grizzly Man, guest star on The Mandalorian) and written and directed by his son Rudolph, however, it goes in a different direction than your average space documentary. It’s weird, beautiful, skeptical, and even a bit funny.

In light of the film’s recent streaming launch, father and son Herzog spoke with Ars Technica from their respective homes about the film’s otherworldly hopes, pessimistic conclusions, and that one part about space colonists having to drink their own urine.

“My accent is a joke”

“[As a narrator], I always spoke in a deadpan [voice], and of course there’s a certain humor in it because listening to my accent is a joke already,” Werner says from his current home in Los Angeles. His son Rudolph, phoning in from Germany, scoffs at this, to which Werner replies, “Well, to some!”

Read 25 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Russia’s disinformation machinery breaks down in wake of Ukraine invasion

Russia’s disinformation machinery breaks down in wake of Ukraine invasion

Enlarge

For decades now, Vladimir Putin has slowly, carefully, and stealthily curated online and offline networks of influence. These efforts have borne lucrative fruit, helping Russia become far more influential than a country so corrupt and institutionally fragile had any right to be. The Kremlin and its proxies had economic holdings across Europe and Africa that would shame some of the smaller 18th-century empires. It had a vast network of useful idiots that it helped get elected and could count on for support, and it controlled much of the day-to-day narrative in multiple countries through online disinformation. And many people had no idea.

While a few big events like the US’s 2016 election and the UK’s Brexit helped bring this meddling to light, many remained unaware or unwilling to accept that Putin’s disinformation machine was influencing them on a wide range of issues. Small groups of determined activists tried to convince the world that the Kremlin had infiltrated and manipulated the economies, politics, and psychology of much of the globe; these warnings were mostly met with silence or even ridicule.

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Why Russia’s “disconnection” from the Internet isn’t amounting to much

Cartoon padlock and broken glass superimposed on a Russian flag.

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gladwell / Getty Images)

Rumors of Russian Internet services degrading have been greatly exaggerated, despite unprecedented announcements recently from two of the world’s biggest backbone providers that they were exiting the country following its invasion of Ukraine.

Just as ISPs provide links connecting individuals or organizations to the Internet, backbone services are the service providers that connect ISPs in one part of the world with those elsewhere. These so-called transit providers route massive amounts of traffic from one ISP or backbone to another. Earlier this week Russian ISPs saw the exit of two of their biggest providers. One was Lumen, the top Internet transit provider to Russia. The other was Cogent, one of the biggest Internet backbone carriers in the world.

Still kicking

A transit provider disconnecting its customers in a country as big as Russia has never happened before, Doug Madory, the director of Internet analysis at network analytics company Kentik, said earlier this week. He and others said the move would constrain the overall amount of bandwidth coming into and out of Russia.

Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

How would an Earth-like planet look in Alpha Centauri?

Artist's impression of what an Earth-like planet might look like in a nearby star system.

Enlarge / Artist’s impression of what an Earth-like planet might look like in a nearby star system. (credit: ESO/L. Calçada)

We now know that our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, is host to at least two planets. But we’re not sure if there are any planets near Alpha Centauri, a binary system just beyond that. If there are, however, we now know what they might look like. New research has used modeling and spectroscopic data of the system’s two stars to estimate what a rocky planet in the system’s habitable zone might be made of.

To estimate the composition of this hypothetical planet—dubbed α-Cen-Earth—the team developed what they call a devolatilization model. To start, they looked at the amounts of volatile (hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, etc.) and non-volatile elements (like iron and silicon) in the Sun and the Earth and looked at how they differed.

Armed with this data, the team then looked at high-resolution spectroscopy data about the elements in the α Centauri A and α Centauri B stars—which provided them information about 22 elements. From their model and this data, they could estimate possible compositions of a hypothetical rocky planet in the system’s habitable zone. “You get a model of the chemical composition of rocky planets that would be in the habitable zone,” Charley Lineweaver, one of the paper’s authors, told Ars.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Find the soul