msnbc.com

Click for video: Msnbc.com's Dara Brown reports on the beta release of the WorldWide Telescope.

After years of thinking and months of internal testing (and occasional tears), Microsoft Research is releasing its WorldWide Telescope software for the public to download and play with. The program requires more computer firepower than other free online astronomy guides, such as Google Sky or Stellarium. But the payoff for the eyes, ears and mind is high enough to make me think about upgrading my hardware.

The last time I caught upgrade fever, the motivation was to watch online video without the computer going into a stall. This time, I'll need to get more memory for my home computer so I don't miss out on the audio and text as I take a tour of the final frontier.

Fortunately, my computer at work fits the minimum system requirements - including a 2 GHz processor, 1 gigabyte of RAM and a 128MB 3-D graphics card - so I was able to download an advance copy of the beta software from Microsoft and try it out late last week. (Microsoft is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

Like other astronomical guides, the WorldWide Telescope takes images from several world-class telescopes and knits them together into a seamless virtual night sky you can navigate with your mouse. You can click on celestial objects to get more information, from the program itself or from the Web. You can even figure out what the night sky will look like from your location, although other free offerings (such as Heavens-Above on the Web) make that job easier.

What sets this telescope apart is the growing selection of multimedia guided tours, often voiced by astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Spitzer Science Center, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and other world-class institutions.

Microsoft Research A portion of the World Wide Telescope's browser window shows the Spitzer Space Telescope's view of the Pleiades star cluster in the the software's Finder Scope. Clicking on the cluster brings up a fact box with links to more information.

More than 30 tours have been created so far. You can sit back and watch as a professional astronomer (or even a 6-year-old kid) takes control of your browser-style window and shows you the sights. You can pause the tour and take a look around on your own, then resume the show or jump onto a related tour.

You also can create your own tour, or download tours from other content creators - for example, through the online communities already set up by Astronomy magazine, Meade 4M and Sky & Telescope. Several tours in the first batch are voiced by Curtis Wong, the Microsoft researcher who heads up the WorldWide Telescope project and gave me an advance peek at the public beta.

"We are working on more intro tours as well," he told me in an e-mail.

Extra goodies are included with the software: You can turn the telescope toward Earth, zooming through aerial imagery a la Google Earth. (The maximum resolution is not as good as Google Earth's, however.) You can scan the surface of other planets in the same way. You can also mouse your way around a couple of jaw-dropping 360-degree panoramas from Mars.

The program is powered by Microsoft's Visual Experience Engine, which is optimized for smooth panning and zooming. Wong hinted that the same architecture could be used for other products as well - such as panoramic virtual-reality tours of earthly destinations. (My favorites in this genre are at Panoramas.dk and PeterMcCready.com.)

Is the WorldWide Telescope ready for prime time? Well ... my work computer wasn't always up to the challenge, even though it squeaked by on the system requirements. Occasionally the program quit unexpectedly - for example, when I clicked in the wrong place while trying to do a search, or when I tried to cancel one tour and open up another one while I had, um, four other programs running.

But this is just the beta testing phase, after all. Check back with me six months from now, after the software has been around the block a few times - and after I've installed that memory upgrade.

The WorldWide Telescope is available for free download via http://www.worldwidetelescope.org (Windows XP or Vista required). Check the Web site for full system requirements and support material.

Update for 3 a.m. ET: Microsoft has issued its news release on the WorldWide Telescope's release, and Astronomy magazine has a package of articles explaining the software and its participation in the project. Sky & Telescope and Meade 4M also weigh in.

Today marks the sixth anniversary of Cosmic Log's founding. In the past year, we've set new records for visitors and comments, thanks in part to those darn glowing cats and other scientific weirdness. In honor of the birthday, I'll point you to the same old quiz I've run over the past few years. How well do you know your Cosmic Log lore? Take the quiz and find out. Then check out these links to some of my favorite subjects:

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• Popular Science: The science of scotch

You can't always judge a quake by its numbers. Two of the magnitude-7-plus quakes recorded in the past six months illustrate the complexities behind scientific statistics. As terrible as it was, last November's magnitude-7.7 quake in Chile ended up killing two people. In contrast, the estimated death toll from today's magnitude-7.9 quake in China, which doesn't sound as if it should be that much stronger, is at 8,500 and rapidly rising.

Although magnitude figures are an easy way to quantify the power of a quake in a headline, it takes something more to tell the whole story of an earthquake's strength.

On one level, the magnitude scale measures what happens to the needle on a seismometer. When Ohio seismologist Charles Richter came up with his scale in the 1930s, the system was set up to standardize the measurement of ground displacement due to seismic waves. He even helped design the seismometers initially used for calculating the scale he invented.

That original scale has been tweaked through the decades, and nowadays calling it the "Richter scale" is an anachronism. The most common measure is known simply as the moment magnitude scale. It uses the same type of logarithmic scaling system that Richter applied to his original scale, even though the seismologist once said "logarithmic plots are a device of the devil."

The scale is set up so that two whole-number steps represent a thousandfold increase in energy released by a quake. Energy values rise in a geometric progression rather than a mere linear progression. A magnitude-7 quake releases 31.6 times more energy than a magnitude-6 quake, and 1,000 times as much as a magnitude-5.

So even though 7.9 doesn't sound like all that much more than 7.7, the bigger quake is almost twice as energetic as the smaller one.

A quake's energy is just one part of the equation, however. The damage done depends not only on that raw energy, but also how it propagates through the soil - and most importantly, the character of the region around the epicenter. The measure of a quake's effect is known as its seismic intensity, and quakes that have a similar magnitude could have widely varying intensity.

If a 7.9 quake occurs in a wasteland and nobody's around to feel it, does it really make an impact? Today's quake didn't happen in a wasteland, but was centered just 55 miles away from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, with an estimated urban population of around 4 million (plus 6 million more people in the surrounding area).

In the past, the modified Mercalli scale has been used as an observational measure of an earthquake's intensity, based on a Roman-numeral scale ranging from I to XII. A Category III quake would merely set some hanging objects swaying, while a Category IX shaker would do heavy damage and provoke general panic. Nowadays, peak ground acceleration serves as a more objective measure of intensity, and is often written into the building codes.

How do you get the full story behind the science of killer earthquakes? You can start with our interactive graphics on earthquake science in general and the Chengdu quake in particular. My colleague Will Femia provides a roundup of earthquake coverage over at his Clicked blog.

The U.S. Geological Survey's Earthquake Hazards Program summarizes the Sichuan situation and presents a podcast as well as a fantastic poster explaining the event.

In the next day or so, we may see before-and-after satellite imagery of the earthquake zone, from outfits such as DigitalGlobe, NASA's MODIS team and GeoEye. The U.S. government's National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is already checking its satellite data, Reuters reports.

Geoeye spokesman Mark Brender cautioned that the imagery has to be precisely targeted to spot the damage to buildings. "We need to know the 'big where' - latitude and longitude coordinates," Brender told me.

While we're on the subject, I should mention that orbiting satellites have been doing a great job of monitoring this month's other dramatic outbursts from Mother Nature. DigitalGlobe, for example, has put together a chilling analysis of before-and-after satellite views from Myanmar's cyclone-hit areas. Meanwhile, today's "Image of the Day" from the MODIS team shows the long plume of ash spewing forth from Chile's Chaiten volcano.

Have you come across other eye-in-the-sky views documenting the latest examples of nature's wrath? Feel free to offer your Internet links, as well as your observations on the seismic numbers game.

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Perimeter Institute

During a presentation on big-bang physics, cosmologist Neil Turok stands in front of a slide showing Raphael's painting of ancient thinkers, "The School of Athens."

A theoretical physics institute must be a bit like a science-fiction starship, in that you actually have to take concepts like extradimensional wormholes and inflationary multiverses seriously. If that's the case, then give a "Star Trek" salute to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics' new captain: cosmologist Neil Turok.

The Canadian public-private research institute, founded with $100 million from BlackBerry billionaire Mike Lazaridis, announced Turok's appointment as executive director today after a nearly yearlong search. Turok will take the helm at Perimeter on Oct. 1.

Turok, who was born in 1958 in South Africa and earned his Ph.D. at Britain's Imperial College, became well-known as famed physicist Stephen Hawking's collaborator on a theoretical exploration of cosmic inflation. In today's announcement from Perimeter, Hawking wished Godspeed to his old No. 1:

"He has been a colleague of mine for a number of years, and I have been very impressed by his insight and originality. The combination of Neil and PI is brilliant and holds great promise for the future."  

As the director of Cambridge University's Center for Theoretical Cosmology, Turok has been working with Princeton cosmologist Barry Steinhardt on a theory suggesting that the universe follows a cyclic path of development - with one extradimensional big bang setting the stage for the next.

Last year they collaborated on a book about the theory titled "Endless Universe," and Turok happened to stop by the Perimeter Institute this March to give a lecture tied to the book's theme. (You can watch the whole lecture online.) At the time, Turok joked that some of his colleagues thought Perimeter's location in Waterloo, Ontario, was "the middle of nowhere."

I asked him about that during a quick interview this morning: What does he tell people who think he's leaving the hallowed halls of Cambridge for the middle of nowhere?

"Well, to be perfectly honest, I am so committed to theoretical physics that I would happily do it on the moon," he told me. "The geographical location isn't key to me."

But he also emphasized that he always knew Waterloo wasn't a one-horse town - and in fact was at the heart of a region that aspires to become a "Silicon Valley in Canada."

"It should, and hopefully will, become a truly international center, meaning that people all over the world will come here," Turok said.

Lazaridis also spoke up for Waterloo - pointing out that the city of nearly 100,000 is the home base of the company he founded, Research in Motion, but also for the widely respected University of Waterloo (where he serves as chancellor). "We have the largest math faculty in the world," Lazaridis noted.

During the interview, Turok and Lazaridis discussed what's ahead for the Perimeter Institute and physics in general. Here's an edited selection of questions and answers:

Cosmic Log: The Perimeter Institute has been known as the loyal opposition to string theory, mostly because of the work of Lee Smolin, Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara and other people have done on loop quantum gravity. Where do you see that direction going? This might be an opportunity to talk about the general direction in which you would want to take the institute.

Turok: Since its founding, what distinguished the Perimeter Institute is actually its open-minded attitudes, and there's a highly respected string-theory group at PI which is actually larger than the loop quantum gravity group. Perhaps it gets less attention because loop quantum gravity is not pursued so much elsewhere.

I don't think Perimeter is about taking a particular approach and pursuing it to the exclusion of others. Rather, PI is a place characterized by open-mindedness, critical thinking. When a new theory or approach is developed, I believe people should be ruthlessly critical of the mathematics behind it, and also the connection to the real world.

In my opinion, string theory is the most promising avenue we have for the unification of gravity and the fundamental forces. But that doesn't mean I'm not critical of it. I think sometimes people do exaggerate its achievements thus far. We need to keep an open mind.

Q: You've been working with Paul Steinhardt on the idea of the ekpyrotic universe, or the cyclic universe. Is this something that you will keep pursuing in your own research as you take on the directorship?

Turok: Yes, I'm certainly continuing to pursue it, and we've made some wonderful progress recently connecting it to holography - which I'm very excited about. But the task of the director at Perimeter is merely to help create an environment in which brilliant young people make original discoveries. So the way in which that happens in theoretical physics is not so much through a director having a particular scientific agenda.

What the director has to do, and what the other senior faculty have to do, is create an atmosphere in which excellence becomes the norm. ... And then you basically provide the freedom for people to follow their own instincts and their own ideas. So that's the kind of atmosphere we want. It's not an atmosphere where one school dominates over the others.

In fact, I think that's one of the very healthy features of PI, that many different directions are pursued. And then there's a free competition between the directions, and the best one wins. That's how healthy science is done.

Q: What do you see as the upcoming strands of experimental physics that might feed into the theoretical side of the equation here. I know that there's been a lot of talk about what the Large Hadron Collider might bring.

Turok: Well, the LHC is the obvious one, and there's a very large community around the world trying to model LHC results and anticipate what it might find. That's extremely exciting, but it's not something which Perimeter is uniquely placed to pursue. Where I see Perimeter having an advantage over other places is in pursuing fundamental theoretical physics, in areas like gravity and quantum theory and how to unify the two.

A lot of that work is mathematical at this stage, and we may not have the means to experimentally test it - but of course one should keep looking for that. The LHC might discover several new particles, or the Higgs particle, but that information by itself will not solve the problem of quantum gravity. I think in a way focusing on the LHC is letting ourselves off the hook a little too lightly. We've got to deal with the really tough problems. And the way we'll get information on those, ultimately, is through observations of the universe - in particular gravitational waves. That's on the horizon now. We expect to see gravitational waves detected within five years, from black holes, and then 10 or 15 years down the road we may see them emerging from the early universe.

So there is no fundamental barrier to using gravitational waves as a probe of the big-bang singularity, which will be the ultimate test of quantum gravity. I think PI takes a long-term view. Mike Lazaridis has said this on many occasions, that the agenda is to make the discoveries which will have an impact on ideas down the line. That should characterize the research. It should be excellent mathematically, should relate to nature and the real world - but we're not looking for results tomorrow.

We're in this for the long run, and we have to live up to the kind of achievements that Einstein and Bohr and Born and these people made in the early part of the 20th century. ...

Q: Mike, I'm sure you get asked this question all the time: Here you are, involved with BlackBerry, which is a very practical device. And you're also involved with the Perimeter Institute - which, as Neil was saying, is a very long-term enterprise. It doesn't appear to have any application to making a better BlackBerry. What would your answer be to that perennial issue [of applied vs. basic research]?

Lazaridis: First of all, what I do for Research in Motion, the company that I founded and continue to lead, is different from my personal pursuits. Perimeter was founded with $100 million of personal investment from my personal holdings. So they are different in the sense that my work for Research in Motion is to further the success of BlackBerry and products like BlackBerry.

The inspiration for Perimeter, of course, came from the understanding and appreciation of the importance of physics to the industry I'm involved in. Without the basic discoveries of quantum mechanics and special relativity, we would not be in the technological revolution and information age that we enjoy today. Semiconductors, lasers, fiber optics, the heart of the Internet today, the heart of the knowledge economy today would not be possible without these fundamental discoveries.

What's interesting for me is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The enormous success, innovation and progress that came out of those fundamental discoveries when they were commercialized by industry have dramatically influenced the world we live in today. ... I'm not a physicist, but I do understand that there is a tremendous number of unsolved questions, unsolved mysteries that require solutions. There are still forces that have to be unified. That work will continue.

One of the results of physics being so successful, and its ability to work with such incredibly complex problems and concepts, is that it is very difficult for society to relate to it sometimes. It's very, very important that we continue to understand its importance, and that we fund it. We have to make sure that we are funding this relatively small community of highly talented men and women who are dedicating their lives to solving what appear to be incredibly complex problems. They could hold the keys to helping society solve our challenges going forward. ...

The important thing here is to realize this is a major coup for theoretical physics. Theoretical physics is an international endeavor that benefits all countries. This is one area that holds incredible promise, should it be able to answer some of the pressing questions in cosmology and force unification.

Turok: I just want to say that Perimeter is an extraordinary experiment, and that's the way it should be looked at. It's an opportunity for theoretical physics the like of which has not been seen before: Can you actually stimulate major breakthroughs by bringing brilliant people from around the world together in a relatively flexible, free environment? I think that's a wonderful experiment, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what the outcome is. None of us really knows. It's not something you can predict. But that's what exciting about it.

Q: So even though you're a theoretician, you're now becoming something of an experimentalist, too.

Turok: Absolutely. That's what makes it fun. We can't anticipate the discoveries we're going to make.

For previous postings about Perimeter, check out Cosmic Log's reports about EinsteinFest and "The Mystery of Dark Matter."

Update for 9:30 p.m. ET: Let's take the "Star Trek" connection a little further: Turok is the name of a video-game character of course, but Tuvok (with a "v") was the Vulcan security officer on "Star Trek: Voyager." Neil Turok's old captain, Stephen Hawking, played himself (supposedly holographically) on "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Don't be surprised if Turok himself shows up on the Web with some Spock ears, like the ones occasionally hung on NASA Administrator Mike Griffin by NASA Watch.

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Univ. of Mich.

Click for video: An artist's conception shows a dust devil on Mars. Click on the image to watch time-lapse imagery of a dust devil from 2007.

Images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are providing an advance peek at what the Phoenix Mars Lander will be running up against when it lands near the planet's north pole later this month: The spacecraft will be coming down in the middle of a spring thaw, and based on the pictures released this week, there just might be some Martian mini-tornadoes swirling through the scene.

Two of the twisters, known as dust devils, show up on an April 20 image of Phoenix's projected landing area, taken by MRO's Context Camera. The Martian whirlwinds are similar to the desert mini-twisters often seen on Earth - and have previously been caught on camera by the Mars Pathfinder lander as well as NASA's Spirit rover. You can watch a dust devil spin through Spirit's line of sight in this year-old video clip.

Phoenix will be landing just as the north polar region is warming up. This picture shows you what the terrain looked like a couple of months ago. The terrain was a honeycomb of dark soil, broken up by patterns of fractures still filled with frozen carbon dioxide.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

Arrows highlight two dust devils whirling across the landing area for the Phoenix Mars Lander, as seen from above by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Click on the image for a larger version.

In contrast, this picture from MRO's Color Imager shows that the frost has largely retreated from Phoenix's projected landing area. A wider view of the dust-devil scene reveals that bright spots of frost still lie within some of the region's craters, but those may soon be gone as well.

A Martian CO2 thaw isn't like a spring thaw on Earth: When carbon dioxide frost fades away, it sublimates directly into a gas and goes into the atmosphere.

The warming atmosphere fuels the formation of dust devils. As explained in this advisory from Malin Space Science Systems, the frequency of dust devils is expected to increase as the thaw proceeds. The full Context Camera strip, which takes in an area 18.6 miles wide and 195 miles long (30 by 314 kilometers) reveals plenty of dark streaks left behind by previous wind action. (Can you spot the two dust devils on the full strip?)

Mars' atmosphere is only 1 percent as dense as Earth's, so it's a matter of some interest among planetary scientists to find out how the wind can play such an active role on the Red Planet. Check out this archived report (and this one) for more about the Red Planet's powerful sand and dust.

To keep up with the latest as the Phoenix Mars Lander zooms toward its May 25 touchdown, check in with our "Return to the Red Planet" section as well as the home page for NASA's Mars Exploration Program. 

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NBC News' Tim Russert isn't the only one selling Hillary Clinton short today: In the wake of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, her shares on the Iowa Electronic Markets have fallen to the lowest point ever. The market lets online investors put real money down on the candidates' prospects, as a science experiment on the "wisdom of crowds." The shares are worth $1 each if the investor's candidate wins the nomination, but they're worthless if the candidate loses.

Today, Clinton's shares for the Democratic nomination were trading at less than 10 cents on the IEM - and the situation was pretty much the same at the InTrade prediction market.

Looking back at the charts, it turns out that the prediction markets didn't stray all that far from the conventional wisdom, but avoided wild swings on a week-by-week basis.

For example, Clinton's win in last month's Pennsylvania primary, coupled with Barack Obama's pastor problem, might have given the impression that the momentum was swinging her way. Those reversals had little effect on the market, however. Sure, there was a slip in Obama's value and an uptick for Clinton, but nothing like the chart-crossing game-changers seen in the early phases of the primary campaign.

Even today's sharp erosion in Clinton's share price brings the level just a few cents below where it was in early March (12.6 cents) and early April (12.4 cents). She bounced back from those lows - and there's always the chance the stock could take another upturn, despite what Tim Russert says. But few investors agreed with Clinton that her narrow Indiana win represented a "tie-breaker." In fact, the market's verdict is that Tuesday's results represented enough of a setback in her political fortunes to justify dumping her stock.

Obama's stock, meanwhile is trading around historic highs: Before today, the high-water mark was 85.9 cents on March 1, and today's prices are edging above that level. If you had bought Obama shares on Jan. 9, the day after the New Hampshire primary - when I wrote the item "Buy Obama, Sell Clinton?" - you would have more than doubled your money by now.

Iowa Electronic Markets

This chart shows how shares for the Democratic candidates have done over the past 14 months. The blue line represents the value of Hillary Clinton's shares, yellow is for Barack Obama, green is for John Edwards, and red is for the "rest of the field." If a candidate wins the Democratic nomination, each of his or her shares pays $1. If he or she loses, the share is worthless. Obama's stock is highest.

What does Obama's rise and Clinton's slide portend for the bigger contest ahead, against Republican John McCain? Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, notes in his Wall Street Journal column that the market for the November general election has been  stable - with the Democrats' shares bringing a higher price than the GOP shares, at 56 cents vs. 45 cents:

"As Sen. Clinton's chances of becoming the Democratic nominee plummeted, and Sen. Obama's soared, the chances of the ultimate Democrat candidate winning the general election remained unchanged. Taken together these two facts yield the interesting implication that perhaps there is not much difference in the electability of Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton.

"Looking forward to November, an Obama-McCain race seems increasingly likely. And Sen. Obama is the early betting favorite."

Wolfers also delves into the intriguing fluctuations in prices during Tuesday night's long, drawn-out vote count - which leads me to wonder whether the election-night pundits should be reporting on the prediction markets while they wait for a winner to be announced.

Should we be hearing more about the prediction markets on the election-night broadcasts going forward - or would that merely prove that political reporting has turned into a kind of horse-race handicapping? Feel free to add your comments below.

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The catastrophic cyclone that hit Myanmar hints at the shape of things to come in a warming world — but probably not for the reason you think. Chris Mooney, the author of "Storm World," argues that the tragedy says more about the sad state of infrastructure in the developing world than it does about the raw impact of climate change. However, shifts in climate will likely accentuate that global rich-vs.-poor split.

Mooney has been focusing on the intersection of science and politics for years - in his Weblog, aptly titled "The Intersection," as well as in his first book, "The Republican War on Science."

"Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming" traces more than a century of often-sharp disputes over climate science. Mooney, who grew up in New Orleans, was moved to delve deeply into the subject by Hurricane Katrina, one of the most politically charged storms in U.S. history.   

But Mooney's interest in the science of storms isn't confined to U.S. borders. Long before this month's tragedy, he started paying close attention to the cyclones and typhoons that sweep through the Pacific and Indian Oceans, as well as the hurricanes in the Atlantic. All three of those terms refer to tropical cyclones, with geography serving as the only distinction.

Typically, every twist and turn of the Atlantic storms is documented for anxious Americans. In contrast, the Pacific and Indian Ocean storms don't draw much attention here unless they turn truly catastrophic, as Cyclone Sidr did last year and Cyclone Nargis did this month.

In an essay for Science Progress, published today, Mooney says the winds weren't the only reason why Sidr and Nargis were so devastating:

"Although the Yucatan and Central America got smacked by back-to-back Category 5 storms last year - Hurricanes Dean and Felix were both far more powerful, meteorologically, than Cyclones Sidr and Nargis - the combined death toll was only 162. That's because nations like Mexico, Nicaragua and Honduras warned their populations and, in some cases, evacuated people in vulnerable areas. It's already painfully obvious that Myanmar's military junta did nothing of the kind."

In a telephone interview, Mooney told me that Cyclone Nargis could well have political implications for the junta - with the caveat that he's a science journalist, not an expert on Asian diplomacy.

"These are major events on the world stage," he said. "If you even look at Katrina and how unprepared George W. Bush looked and how much that hurt him politically, it's sort of a similar analogy."

Mooney said an even bigger issue faces not only Myanmar, but Bangladesh and other vulnerable countries in the cyclone zone: "There's a huge socioeconomic disparity, in terms of levels of preparedness, and in terms of levels of damage, and especially in terms of numbers killed by cyclones in the world. And that's something we've got to address."

Here are additional excerpts from today's Q&A on Cyclone Nargis and its implications. You can also hear the whole interview as an MP3 audio file suitable for downloading or online listening.

Q: Is this another sign that the global warming nightmare is coming upon us?

Mooney: I'd be careful about saying that. There's good evidence that global warming should affect tropical cyclones ... in some way and probably make them stronger on average. But when you get a catastrophe like this, global warming isn't the direct cause, and it really doesn't explain why there's been so much suffering.

You really have to look at other factors in order to figure out why a storm can hit the United States and only a couple die, and a storm can hit Myanmar and tens of thousands of people die. That has much more to do with socioeconomic conditions, forecasting systems, lack of evacuation, lack of communication to the populace, and all these other things.

NASA / MODIS

These images show views of the coast of Myanmar captured by NASA's Terra satellite before and after Cyclone Nargis hit. The top image is from April 15, and the bottom image shows extensive flooding on May 5. Click on the image for a larger version.

Q: Is this another case of a perfect storm, where, as in Katrina, it happened to hit just wrong and was something that played on all the vulnerabilities that that area faced?

A: It's certainly looking like that. You had something with Nargis that you didn't have with Katrina. Katrina, we saw it coming days in advance. We saw a Category 5, and we were just sitting there waiting. Well, Nargis rapidly intensified at the last minute. It had been a fairly weak storm, and then it just started exploding even as it headed toward the coastline. So people didn't even know there was a bad storm coming until maybe just 24 or 48 hours out. And it kept getting worse and worse and worse, and then it hit a vulnerable place.

Q: But you had written about Nargis, gosh, more than a week in advance and indicated that this would be a pretty bad storm.

A: Yeah, I blogged about it. I wrote about it over at the Daily Green. I track cyclones, so whenever I see something developing in the Bay of Bengal, and I see the ocean temperatures are really warm ... you just know that it can't be good. I didn't know how strong the storm was going to get, but I knew that the ocean temperatures were warm and I knew that it was already completely formed - and it had this ocean ready to pounce and ready to draw energy from. If you look at the Bay of Bengal, it sucked a couple of degrees Celsius out of the ocean and flung that at the coastline.

Q: So I guess the question would be, if you could figure this out just looking at the satellite imagery, why couldn't the authorities there figure it out? Or does it point to something about the regime in Myanmar that's screwed up?

A: I think it's a political thing, and I think it's a socioeconomic thing. Myself and hurricane forecasters who do this at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center could obviously look at satellite pictures and do a lot of other things, and they did. The Indian Meteorological [Department] was tracking the storm. I think that forecasting is not nearly as good in the Bay of Bengal region as it is for the United States and the Atlantic region. But it does exist.

Nevertheless, if people aren't warned, if people aren't informed about what's coming, they don't have access to computers necessarily to do the kind of thing I'm doing. If they're living in flimsy structures, if they're living near coastlines and they aren't evacuated, you can get massive casualties. And that's what we're seeing.

Q: Even though this really says more about the state of international development than it does about global climate change, I suppose you could argue that this is a preview of the sorts of dislocations that could come with climate change or stronger storms. You've got a collision of the low level of infrastructure in some of these low-lying areas with the potential for stronger storms or changes in weather patterns that may stress populations that haven't faced that sort of stress.

A: Absolutely. We don't know: Global warming might affect cyclones on a regional level, and so you might get certain hotspot areas where you get a lot more of them. That might be, say, the Arabian Sea or the Bay of Bengal. It's been very busy there lately. This is the third Category 4 or 5 [storm] in the space of a year in the north Indian Ocean, which encompasses the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. So that's troubling.

Gail Albert Halaban

Chris Mooney focuses on climate in "Storm World."

And even if climate change doesn't end up having a large dramatic effect on cyclonic storms, which we're still trying to study and figure out, there's just no doubt that it's going to raise sea level.  These are already low-lying places with a lot of people living there. If the ocean starts coming toward them, even in a slow way, that's going to be very destabilizing. And if they then get a storm with a higher ocean, you compound the risk.

Q: Since you came out with your book ... has there been new information that's come to light that has led you to see a different perspective? What's the latest on the intersection between climate science and the way that society works?

A: Well, the good news scientifically is that this is a growth area, and a lot of researchers have now dived into the field and they're doing a lot of studies. The bad news is that makes it probably murkier than ever. .... More science doesn't necessarily generate clear answers immediately. Scientists are starting to study all kinds of things, like what if storms get more intense but their numbers decrease? Is that bad, or good, or does it wash out on balance? That might be one of the possibilities now. So it's not as clear-cut as anyone might have said immediately after Katrina.

Listen to the full interview, including a discussion of a previous world-changing storm, by clicking on this link to the MP3 audio (9 MB). And tell us whether or not you want more Cosmic Loggery via audio. If you're into that sort of thing, you might enjoy this Cosmic Log pilot podcast about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. By the way, if you want to "reimagine" the Cosmic Log theme on your own theremin, ondes Martenot or musical saw, feel free to do so, and send me a copy.

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Courtesy of Cal Orey

Cal Orey says her Brittany spaniels, Simon and Seth, help her predict seismic events.

Tiny earthquakes have been swarming near Reno for weeks, and seismic experts are trying to gauge whether things are settling down or heading toward a bigger rumble. All this is making some of the region's residents jittery - including Cal Orey, who lives near Lake Tahoe and issues earthquake predictions based on such things as headaches, pet behavior and moon phases.

Orey made headlines when she called the current wave of shakers in advance - and now she thinks a stronger quake could hit by the end of this month. To be specific, she's predicting a 70 percent chance of a magnitude-5 to magnitude-6 quake in the Reno/Tahoe/Sierra region by the end of May.

"I'm not saying 100 percent," she told me today. "But it's likely."

Seismologists don't tend to put stock in such predictions, as I explained in a report about quake forecasting a couple of years ago. However, the practical effect of what the experts are saying is pretty much the same: Be prepared for a Bigger One.

"We can't predict earthquakes, but we are using the publicity that this sequence of events has generated to try to encourage people to be ready for a large earthquake," said John Anderson, director of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory at the University of Nevada at Reno. "The issue is preparedness."

Anderson said the rumbling in Reno began in late February, just a week after a magnitude-6 earthquake shook buildings in Wells, Nev. (Orey pointed to a report showing that she predicted that one, too.) At first, there were two or three seismic events per day that measured magnitude 1 or greater. But the activity increased in April, climaxing with a shallow magnitude-4.7 shock that rattled Reno's residents.

"After that we had fairly intense activity, which in hindsight looks like an aftershock sequence," Anderson told me today. "Initially, the rates were dropping down pretty fast, but now for the last six days, it looks like the rates have stabilized at 20 per day. We'd like to see them dropping off faster, which would give us confidence that it's an aftershock."

Can science predict quakes?
Experts have been monitoring the situation with a widely distributed network of strong-motion instruments, supplemented by portable sensors from the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology. But the sensor readings can't be used to predict with any certainty what might happen.

Marilyn Newton / Gazette-Journal via AP file

Keith Phillips checks the damage to his house in Mogul, Nev., a suburb of Reno, on April 26.

"While the heightened probabilities of an earthquake in the next few days might seem dramatic, the probability never really goes down to zero," Anderson said.

He said that goes for other quake-prone areas as well: "These earthquakes are a good reminder for anybody anyplace in the country to be ready to take the very simple precautions that one can find on a dozen Web sites."

Will there ever be a scientific way to predict damaging quakes? Some alert systems have been set up to provide a limited amount of advance warning that a major shaking is on the way, giving emergency agencies a precious few seconds to protect critical infrastructure. The warning systems, pioneered by Japan, are designed to detect the precursor seismic waves that come before more damaging waves.

"We've thought about that, but for this particular source zone and for downtown Reno, this type of warning is not going to give people much help," Anderson said. At best, there would be a second or less of warning. And there's no scientific way to predict a quake days in advance, he said.

Can people predict quakes?
That doesn't stop "earthquake sensitives" from trading predictions on Web forums such as Earthquake Epi-Center (which Orey co-founded). Some sensitives speculate that they are picking up on magnetic fields that may be precursors of seismic activity - and that they feel the effect of those fields as headaches, nausea or anxiety.

Orey agreed that the idea sounds crazy. "I've had people say how their body hurts before a quake, and I always thought they were wacky," she said.

But now she numbers herself among the sensitives, and often takes cues from her cat Kerouac and her two Brittany spaniels. "I realized that humans can be just like animals, and they can fine-tune these senses," she said.

Orey's mentor in the field is retired geologist Jim Berkland, who looks for links between quakes and the potential effects of the sun and the moon on Earth's tidal flexing. Orey saw a link between the Wells earthquake and February's total lunar eclipse. Now she thinks tonight's new moon as well as the full moon at mid-month may give an extra "nudge" to Reno's seismic activity.

"It's playing out the way I knew it was going to," she told me.

By the way, Reno isn't the only focus of Orey's predictions: She also sees the prospect for seismic activity rising this month to a magnitude of 6 to 7 in Northern California, around Eureka.

The prediction game is a bit like playing the slots in a Nevada casino, in that a few successes can make up for a host of failures: If Orey is wrong, her forecast will be little-noted - but if she's right, it might earn yet another headline. Is Orey going out on a limb, or is she merely playing the percentages? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

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UW-Madison

Ions glow inside an electrostatic fusion reactor at the University of Wisconsin.

One of the nation's top fusion researchers is worried that America is already falling behind in an energy race that won't start for 30 or 40 years.

"We're losing our lead to other countries in the world," Gerald Kulcinski, director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me in his office last week.

How can that be, when most of the world's top technological powers are working together on a $13 billion nuclear fusion research project that hasn't even started construction yet? Kulcinski's answer demonstrates why an "Apollo-scale" effort to solve America's energy woes just might require more thought and time than the original Apollo moon effort.

Long-term investment
Nuclear fusion is shaping up as one of the longer-term investments in the power portfolio. For the next few decades, cleaner coal, biofuels, nuclear fission, geothermal, wind and solar power will be much bigger factors in the energy equation. Theoretically, fusion could provide clean, cheap and abundant power - that is, once scientists solve all the technological challenges associated with controlling the nuclear reaction that fuels the sun.

That's what the $13 billion ITER project is all about: By 2016, a huge magnetic containment vessel (also known as a tokamak) is to be built at a facility in France. Researchers will use that tokamak to test their concepts for sustaining a fusion reaction.

ITER's schedule calls for 20 years of research operations - leading to the construction of a prototype for a commercial fusion reactor, known as DEMO, and then actual commercialization.

NASA file

Fusion researcher Gerald Kulcinski speaks during a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council.

Kulcinski is worried about the latter stages of the plan. Once ITER and its follow-up projects demonstrate that fusion power can be sustained and controlled inside a magnetic vessel, it's up to the parties in the project - the United States as well as China, Europe, India, Japan, Russia and South Korea - to figure out how best to get the power out.

"First you do the physics," Ned Sauthoff, the head of the U.S. ITER program, told me back in March. "You get yourself a burning plasma. Once you've gotten a burning plasma, then it's a matter for the politicians to decide, do they want to invest in the technology?"

In Kulcinski's view, that's the key step: "If it really works, you better figure out what you're going to do with it," he told me.

But at a time when other countries are putting more resources into fusion research, less and less U.S. funding is going into developing the technology for extracting power from a magnetically contained fusion plasma, Kulcinski said.

He said his own program has had a lot of success in magnetic fusion development, but "we're in danger of losing that now as resources get pulled away and faculty retire or die off or whatever, and we're not replacing them now with people who are looking down the road at the end product."

By the time magnetic confinement fusion is ready for commercialization, perhaps a generation from now, America will sorely miss the scientists and engineers who should have been trained for the task, Kulcinski said. "It's very ironic: The closer we get to that, the more it's collapsing," he said.

Other paths to fusion
ITER's path to fusion isn't the only one: For more than three decades, the University of Wisconsin's institute has focused its research not only on magnetic containment, but also on the other two "legs" of fusion research: laser-powered inertial confinement, which is to be developed in the United States at the National Ignition Facility; and inertial electrostatic fusion, which has been in the news recently due to the work of the late physicist/engineer Robert Bussard.

Today, the institute is funded to the tune of about $15 million a year, with 150 people working on fusion, Kulcinski said. Inertial confinement fusion currently accounts for about two-thirds of the technology development work being done at the institute.

Laser inertial confinement, which involves blasting pellets of hydrogen isotopes with precisely timed laser bursts, carries its own challenges. But the "inertial fusion folks have a much more healthy view of their end product than the magnetic fusion folks," Kulcinski said.

"There are programs that are supported to look down the road and say, 'Well, if this works, here's what our reactor will look like,'" he said.

If Kulcinski had to pick a favorite in the decades-long fusion marathon, it might well be the dark horse in the race: electrostatic fusion, which involves packing ions densely within a negatively charged grid or a cloud of electrons. He and his colleagues have been experimenting with electrostatic grid reactors for years.

"We're not even close to break-even," Kulcinski said. But the devices do produce enough high-energy protons to create short-lived radioisotopes for medical applications.

"It's an early application of fusion that has nothing to do with electricity," he said.

Kulcinski foresees a day when every hospital could have its own little fusion reactor churning out oxygen-15 and other isotopes for diagnostic purposes. (Right now they're created in cyclotrons.)

He said fusion devices could also be used to detect hidden nuclear weapons and buried explosive devices. They could even disable nuclear weapons. "We probably shouldn't discuss that, but there are ways," he said.

To the moon?
The real promise of the electrostatic devices, at least the way Kulcinski sees it, is that the electrostatic devices can be used for fusion reactions using helium-3. His group has been experimenting with a deuterium-helium-3 combination as well as with pure helium-3.

Such reactions are much cleaner than the deuterium-tritium reaction favored for the magnetic and inertial confinement devices. The D-T reaction is easier to achieve, but it produces waves of neutrons that would lead to radioactive contamination of the reactors.

Helium-3 is rare on Earth, but there's an abundance of the stuff on the moon - which is why space veterans such as Apollo 17 astronaut (and former U.S. senator) Harrison Schmitt is on the helium-3 bandwagon.

"About 40 tons of helium-3 would produce all the electricity we use in the United States in 2008. ... The moon may be a major source of new energy, and it would make the investment in the space program one of the largest payoffs in history. If in fact it all happened, this would be a huge return on taxpayers' money, as well as all the other things we do in space," Kulcinski said.

But there are lots of hurdles on the way to that nuclear nirvana: Exactly how can you scale up electrostatic fusion past the break-even point? Could future moon-mining operations really extract helium-3 from the moon and send it to Earth efficiently enough to turn a profit? Would the reaction be as clean as Kulcinski thinks it would be? Some experts have voiced grave doubts about the prospects for helium-3 fusion, or even for fusion power in general.

Answers ahead
Kulcinski predicted that each of the three potential routes to fusion will have its turn to prove itself.

"We'll do the easiest one first: That's D-T [deuterium-tritium fusion] in tokamaks. In my personal opinion, I don't think tokamaks will ever be commercially effective," he said. "I think laser fusion, or heavy-ion fusion, or X-ray fusion has a chance of being economic, probably a better chance than magnetic fusion, but it's hard to quantify."

He sees electrostatic fusion reactors using helium-3 as the best long-term option. "We could put the thing right downtown," he said.

If Kulcinski's prediction is to hold true, researchers will have to continue working on all three routes: the magnetic route, the laser inertial route and the electrostatic route.

Currently, the most promising path toward electrostatic fusion runs through Santa Fe, N.M., where a team at EMC2 Fusion Development Corp. is currently trying to validate Bussard's results. The team's leader, Richard Nebel, told me this week that it's still too early to gauge how promising the Bussard fusion device could be.

"We're getting high-power plasma," he said. "We don't have answers ... [but] we're far enough along that we know we're going to get answers."

Who knows? Maybe the dark horse in this race will pull off a surprise or two yet.

Update for 2:20 p.m. ET May 5: Nebel goes into more detail about what to expect (and what not to expect) on the Talk-Polywell.org discussion forum.

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NASA

Put your name on NASA's next lunar probe.

Now's the time to send your name on a trip to the moon ... or find the bright star in the sky known as the international space station ... or catch a meteor shower ... or tune in to the past and the future of space exploration on your computer.

All of these opportunities are available over the next few days, and any one would serve as a fitting celebration of Space Day.

We've already celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Space Age, in Russia and America, and last month it was time for a global space party on Yuri's Night. So why schedule yet another space-themed celebration on Friday? Well, this one is for the kids.

Space Day was established in 1997 by a consortium of businesses and other institutions, led by Lockheed Martin, as an opportunity to educate the next generation about space exploration. It takes place on the first Friday of May, serving as a nod to President Kennedy's May 1961 speech to Congress in which he set America on a course for the moon.

This year, more than 100 events have been registered as Space Day activities - including a daylong celebration at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington on Saturday that's expected to draw 10,000 participants. The Space Day Web site also offers online games and 101 suggested activities to get kids in a spacey mood.

But you don't have to confine yourself to the official program. It turns out that the next week offers several ways to create your own personal Space Day:

• Put your name in space: It's easy to deliver your name to the moon aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is scheduled for launch later this year. Just type the name in on this Web page and hit the button. It will be added to a digital database that will be stored aboard the spacecraft on a microchip. You can even print out a certificate recognizing your participation in the project. Deadline for submitting names is June 27. If you want your name and a digitized photo on the moon's surface, you can add them to the Google Lunar X Prizes program's Lunar Legacy database for $10. The Space Day team also offers an annual Student Signatures in Space program for elementary schools and middle schools.
• See the space station: Assuming that the skies are clear, most residents of North America and Europe will have multiple opportunities to watch the international space station overhead this month. NASA offers a variety of satellite-tracking applications as well as a simple-to-use database of sighting opportunities. and SpaceWeather.com has just released a new online tool that tells you when you can see the space station, the Genesis inflatable modules and other orbiting craft, based on your ZIP code.
• Watch space events over the Web: NASA Television is broadcasting Saturday's rollout of the space shuttle Discovery, as well as live and repeat coverage of the 2008 Astronaut Hall of Fame induction ceremony. This year, shuttle astronauts John Blaha, Bob Cabana, Bryan O'Connor and Loren Shriver are the honorees. The event begins at 3 p.m. ET Saturday. To stay on top of NASA TV's schedule for weeks to come, check this program listing.
• See a meteor shower: The annual Eta Aquarid meteor shower is due to peak during the wee hours of Tuesday morning. This celestial show occurs when Earth passes through the trail of cosmic debris left behind by Halley's Comet. The Eta Aquarids aren't usually on the A-list, but the viewing should be good this year because the moon will be absent from the sky, and the dust trail is expected to be denser than usual. Prime viewing will be from the Southern Hemisphere, but northern observers could see 10 or more Eta Aquarid meteors per hour. Check out Meteor Showers Online for the details - and follow my top 10 tips for meteor-watching.
• Attend a star party: Hot on the heels of Space Day, May 10 is Astronomy Day - a time when skywatchers around the world organize events to introduce the public to the joys of astronomy. The official listings include events in India, Iran and Peru as well as less exotic areas. Find out what's going on in your own locality - on Space Day, Astronomy Day, or any day - by consulting this comprehensive list of astronomy clubs.
• But wait ... there's more: Special events are being planned to mark the touchdown of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander on May 25. If you want to be close to where the action is, make your plans for Planetfest 2008 in California or the Phoenix celebration in Arizona. Your local science center may be planning something as well. In any case, you should be able to tune in NASA TV and follow along online as the Phoenix makes its descent. Touchdown is timed for 7:36 p.m. ET, with confirmation of landing due at 7:53 p.m.

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