Unusual Earthquake Gave Japan Tsunami Extra Punch, Say Scientists

ScienceDaily  — The magnitude 9 earthquake and resulting tsunami that struck Japan on March 11 were like a one-two punch -- first violently shaking, then swamping the islands -- causing tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. Now Stanford researchers have discovered the catastrophe was caused by a sequence of unusual geologic events never before seen so clearly.

This diagram shows the March 11 fault motion sequence. 1. Rupture of the fault plane begins at the epicenter. 2. Rupture travels westward, down the fault plane towards Honshu. The island suffers violent shaking for 40 seconds. 3. The upward sloping east side of the fault plane begins to rupture, continuing for 30 to 35 seconds. The sediments overlying the east side expand up the fault plane in response to the force of the rupture. 4. The water above the sediments is pushed into an unstable dome that then flows out in all directions as a tsunami. (Credit: Anna Cobb, Stanford News Service)
"It was not appreciated before this earthquake that this size of earthquake was possible on this plate boundary," said Stanford geophysicist Greg Beroza. "It was thought that typical earthquakes were much smaller."
The earthquake occurred in a subduction zone, where one great tectonic plate is being forced down under another tectonic plate and into Earth's interior along an active fault.
The fault on which the Tohoku-Oki earthquake took place slopes down from the ocean floor toward the west. It first ruptured mainly westward from its epicenter -- 32 kilometers (about 20 miles) below the seafloor -- toward Japan, shaking the island of Honshu violently for 40 seconds.
Surprisingly, the fault then ruptured eastward from the epicenter, up toward the ocean floor along the sloping fault plane for about 30 or 35 seconds.
As the rupture neared the seafloor, the movement of the fault grew rapidly, violently deforming the seafloor sediments sitting on top of the fault plane, punching the overlying water upward and triggering the tsunami.
"When the rupture approached the seafloor, it exploded into tremendously large slip," said Beroza. "It displaced the seafloor dramatically.
"This amplification of slip near the surface was predicted in computer simulations of earthquake rupture, but this is the first time we have clearly seen it occur in a real earthquake.
"The depth of the water column there is also greater than elsewhere," Beroza said. "That, together with the slip being greatest where the fault meets the ocean floor, led to the tsunami being outlandishly big."
Beroza is one of the authors of a paper detailing the research, published online in Science Express.
"Now that this slip amplification has been observed in the Tohoku-Oki earthquake, what we need to figure out is whether similar earthquakes -- and large tsunamis -- could happen in other subduction zones around the world," he said.
Beroza said the sort of "two-faced" rupture seen in the Tohoku-Oki earthquake has not been seen in other subduction zones, but that could be a function of the limited amount of data available for analyzing other earthquakes.
There is a denser network of seismometers in Japan than any other place in the world, he said. The sensors provided researchers with much more detailed data than is normally available after an earthquake, enabling them to discern the different phases of the March 11 temblor with much greater resolution than usual.
Prior to the Tohoku-Oki earthquake, Beroza and Shuo Ma, who is now an assistant professor at San Diego State University, had been working on computer simulations of what might happen during an earthquake in just such a setting. Their simulations had generated similar "overshoot" of sediments overlying the upper part of the fault plane.
Following the Japanese earthquake, aftershocks as large as magnitude 6.5 slipped in the opposite direction to the main shock. This is a symptom of what is called "extreme dynamic overshoot" of the upper fault plane, Beroza said, with the overextended sediments on top of the fault plane slipping during the aftershocks back in the direction they came from.
"We didn't really expect this to happen because we believe there is friction acting on the fault" that would prevent any rebound, he said. "Our interpretation is that it slipped so much that it sort of overdid it. And in adjusting during the aftershock sequence, it went back a bit.
"We don't see these bizarre aftershocks on parts of the fault where the slip is less," he said.
The damage from the March 11 earthquake was so extensive in part simply because the earthquake was so large. But the way it ruptured on the fault plane, in two stages, made the devastation greater than it might have been otherwise, Beroza said.
The deeper part of the fault plane, which sloped downward to the west, was bounded by dense, hard rock on each side. The rock transmitted the seismic waves very efficiently, maximizing the amount of shaking felt on the island of Honshu.
The shallower part of the fault surface, which slopes upward to the east and surfaces at the Japan Trench -- where the overlying plate is warped downward by the motion of the descending plate -- had massive slip. Unfortunately, this slip was ideally situated to efficiently generate the gigantic tsunami, with devastating consequences.
Other coauthors of the Science Express paper are Annemarie Baltay, a graduate student in geophysics at Stanford, and Satoshi Ide, an associate professor of Earth and planetary science at the University of Tokyo.

Violent Video Games Reduce Brain Response to Violence and Increase Aggressive Behavior, Study Suggests

ScienceDaily — Scientists have known for years that playing violent video games causes players to become more aggressive. The findings of a new University of Missouri (MU) study provide one explanation for why this occurs: the brains of violent video game players become less responsive to violence, and this diminished brain response predicts an increase in aggression.

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"Many researchers have believed that becoming desensitized to violence leads to increased human aggression. Until our study, however, this causal association had never been demonstrated experimentally," said Bruce Bartholow, associate professor of psychology in the MU College of Arts and Science.
During the study, 70 young adult participants were randomly assigned to play either a nonviolent or a violent video game for 25 minutes. Immediately afterwards, the researchers measured brain responses as participants viewed a series of neutral photos, such as a man on a bike, and violent photos, such as a man holding a gun in another man's mouth. Finally, participants competed against an opponent in a task that allowed them to give their opponent a controllable blast of loud noise. The level of noise blast the participants set for their opponent was the measure of aggression.
The researchers found that participants who played one of several popular violent games, such as "Call of Duty," "Hitman," "Killzone" and "Grand Theft Auto," set louder noise blasts for their opponents during the competitive task -- that is, they were more aggressive -- than participants who played a nonviolent game. In addition, for participants that had not played many violent video games before completing the study, playing a violent game in the lab caused a reduced brain response to the photos of violence -- an indicator of desensitization. Moreover, this reduced brain response predicted participants' aggression levels: the smaller the brain response to violent photos, the more aggressive participants were. Participants who had already spent a lot of time playing violent video games before the study showed small brain response to the violent photos, regardless of which type of game they played in the lab.
"The fact that video game exposure did not affect the brain activity of participants who already had been highly exposed to violent games is interesting and suggests a number of possibilities," Bartholow said. "It could be that those individuals are already so desensitized to violence from habitually playing violent video games that an additional exposure in the lab has very little effect on their brain responses. There also could be an unmeasured factor that causes both a preference for violent video games and a smaller brain response to violence. In either case, there are additional measures to consider."
Bartholow said that future research should focus on ways to moderate media violence effects, especially among individuals who are habitually exposed. He cites surveys that indicate that the average elementary school child spends more than 40 hours a week playing video games -- more than any other activity besides sleeping. As young children spend more time with video games than any other forms of media, the researchers say children could become accustomed to violent behavior as their brains are forming.
"More than any other media, these video games encourage active participation in violence," said Bartholow. "From a psychological perspective, video games are excellent teaching tools because they reward players for engaging in certain types of behavior. Unfortunately, in many popular video games, the behavior is violence."
Other authors in the study include Christopher Engelhardt, graduate student in the MU Department of Psychological Sciences, and researchers from The Ohio State University and VU University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The journal article, "This Is Your Brain on Violent Video Games: Neural Desensitization to Violence Predicts Increased Aggression Following Violent Video Game Exposure," will be published in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Physics and the Immortality of the Soul

Physics and the Immortality of the Soul

By Sean M. Carroll 

The topic of "life after death" raises disreputable connotations of past-life regression and haunted houses, but there are a large number of people in the world who believe in some form of persistence of the individual soul after life ends. Clearly this is an important question, one of the most important ones we can possibly think of in terms of relevance to human life. If science has something to say about, we should all be interested in hearing.
Adam Frank thinks that science has nothing to say about it. He advocates being "firmly agnostic" on the question. (His coblogger Alva Noë resolutely disagrees.) I have an enormous respect for Adam; he's a smart guy and a careful thinker. When we disagree it's with the kind of respectful dialogue that should be a model for disagreeing with non-crazy people. But here he couldn't be more wrong.
Adam claims that there "simply is no controlled, experimental[ly] verifiable information" regarding life after death. By these standards, there is no controlled, experimentally verifiable information regarding whether the Moon is made of green cheese. Sure, we can take spectra of light reflecting from the Moon, and even send astronauts up there and bring samples back for analysis. But that's only scratching the surface, as it were. What if the Moon is almost all green cheese, but is covered with a layer of dust a few meters thick? Can you really say that you know this isn't true? Until you have actually examined every single cubic centimeter of the Moon's interior, you don't really have experimentally verifiable information, do you? So maybe agnosticism on the green-cheese issue is warranted. (Come up with all the information we actually do have about the Moon; I promise you I can fit it into the green-cheese hypothesis.)
Obviously this is completely crazy. Our conviction that green cheese makes up a negligible fraction of the Moon's interior comes not from direct observation, but from the gross incompatibility of that idea with other things we think we know. Given what we do understand about rocks and planets and dairy products and the Solar System, it's absurd to imagine that the Moon is made of green cheese. We know better.
We also know better for life after death, although people are much more reluctant to admit it. Admittedly, "direct" evidence one way or the other is hard to come by -- all we have are a few legends and sketchy claims from unreliable witnesses with near-death experiences, plus a bucketload of wishful thinking. But surely it's okay to take account of indirect evidence -- namely, compatibility of the idea that some form of our individual soul survives death with other things we know about how the world works.
Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there's no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?
Everything we know about quantum field theory (QFT) says that there aren't any sensible answers to these questions. Of course, everything we know about quantum field theory could be wrong. Also, the Moon could be made of green cheese.
Among advocates for life after death, nobody even tries to sit down and do the hard work of explaining how the basic physics of atoms and electrons would have to be altered in order for this to be true. If we tried, the fundamental absurdity of the task would quickly become evident.
Even if you don't believe that human beings are "simply" collections of atoms evolving and interacting according to rules laid down in the Standard Model of particle physics, most people would grudgingly admit that atoms are part of who we are. If it's really nothing but atoms and the known forces, there is clearly no way for the soul to survive death. Believing in life after death, to put it mildly, requires physics beyond the Standard Model. Most importantly, we need some way for that "new physics" to interact with the atoms that we do have.
Very roughly speaking, when most people think about an immaterial soul that persists after death, they have in mind some sort of blob of spirit energy that takes up residence near our brain, and drives around our body like a soccer mom driving an SUV. The questions are these: what form does that spirit energy take, and how does it interact with our ordinary atoms? Not only is new physics required, but dramatically new physics. Within QFT, there can't be a new collection of "spirit particles" and "spirit forces" that interact with our regular atoms, because we would have detected them in existing experiments. Ockham's razor is not on your side here, since you have to posit a completely new realm of reality obeying very different rules than the ones we know.
But let's say you do that. How is the spirit energy supposed to interact with us? Here is the equation that tells us how electrons behave in the everyday world:

Don't worry about the details; it's the fact that the equation exists that matters, not its particular form. It's the  Dirac equation -- the two terms on the left are roughly the velocity of the electron and its inertia -- coupled to electromagnetism and gravity, the two terms on the right.
As far as every experiment ever done is concerned, this equation is the correct description of how electrons behave at everyday energies. It's not a complete description; we haven't included the weak nuclear force, or couplings to hypothetical particles like the Higgs boson. But that's okay, since those are only important at high energies and/or short distances, very far from the regime of relevance to the human brain.
If you believe in an immaterial soul that interacts with our bodies, you need to believe that this equation is not right, even at everyday energies. There needs to be a new term (at minimum) on the right, representing how the soul interacts with electrons. (If that term doesn't exist, electrons will just go on their way as if there weren't any soul at all, and then what's the point?) So any respectable scientist who took this idea seriously would be asking -- what form does that interaction take? Is it local in spacetime? Does the soul respect gauge invariance and Lorentz invariance? Does the soul have a Hamiltonian? Do the interactions preserve unitarity and conservation of information?
Nobody ever asks these questions out loud, possibly because of how silly they sound. Once you start asking them, the choice you are faced with becomes clear: either overthrow everything we think we have learned about modern physics, or distrust the stew of religious accounts/unreliable testimony/wishful thinking that makes people believe in the possibility of life after death. It's not a difficult decision, as scientific theory-choice goes.
We don't choose theories in a vacuum. We are allowed -- indeed, required -- to ask how claims about how the world works fit in with other things we know about how the world works. I've been talking here like a particle physicist, but there's an analogous line of reasoning that would come from evolutionary biology. Presumably amino acids and proteins don't have souls that persist after death. What about viruses or bacteria? Where upon the chain of evolution from our monocellular ancestors to today did organisms stop being described purely as atoms interacting through gravity and electromagnetism, and develop an immaterial immortal soul?
There's no reason to be agnostic about ideas that are dramatically incompatible with everything we know about modern science. Once we get over any reluctance to face reality on this issue, we can get down to the much more interesting questions of how human beings and consciousness really work.
Sean Carroll is a physicist and author. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1993, and is now on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology, where his research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology. Carroll is the author of From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, and Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity. He has written for Discover, Scientific American, New Scientist, and other publications. His blog Cosmic Variance is hosted by Discover magazine, and he has been featured on television shows such as The Colbert Report, National Geographic's Known Universe, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. His Twitter handle is  @seanmcarroll
Cross-posted on Cosmic Variance.
The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=physics-and-the-immortality-of-the-2011-05-23&WT.mc_id=SA_WR_20110525

Goal to halve number of LDCs in next 10 years

Ahead of next week's conference in Turkey on the world's least developed countries, some leading participants outline plans and targets to reduce poverty

Children play football in Lubango, Angola – one of the nations predicted to ‘graduate’ out of being a least developed country. Photograph: Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images

Halving the number of least developed countries – the world's 48 poorest states – in the next 10 years is a realistic goal, according to a top UN official, despite a marked lack of progress in the last decade.
Cheick Sidi Diarra, a UN special representative for LDCs, outlined the ambition ahead of next week's UN conference on LDCs in Istanbul, Turkey. Bringing together about 50 heads of state or prime ministers and Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.
"It's not unrealistic because several LDCs have made strong progress in terms of economic growth and social inclusion," Diarra said, "for example Equatorial Guinea, Vanuatu, Angola, Tuvalu, Samoa and some others have been making strides, which make us believe they will be graduating during the next decade."
It's brave talk considering the meagre advances so far. Since the establishment of the category in 1971, only three countries have "graduated" from the list: Botswana in 1994, Cape Verde in 2007 and Maldives in January this year. Diarra said next week's conference – which takes place every 10 years – will assess the progress made by LDCs and development partners under the last action plan set out in Brussels in 2001.
The Turkish president, Abdullah Gül, warned that a situation in which 900 million people lived in poverty, with most of them living on $1.25 a day, was not sustainable.
"It is an alarming situation, in moral and political terms," said Gül. "During previous times, communications were not so well-developed – but now everyone is aware of the amount of wealth in other countries and that makes the situation unsustainable. We want this meeting to give warning signals and we would like to see measures taken."
Gül said Turkey was keen to introduce mechanisms at the conference to ensure that decisions and commitments would be followed up – unlike in the past three LDC conferences.
"When I talk about follow-up, I mean not just from donor countries but also from LDCs," he said, "as their leadership capacity and institutions are not well established enough to realise their commitments."
The UK is also emphasising the importance of following up previous commitments, and wants all parties – donors, LDCs and others – to reconfirm their commitment to meet the millennium development goals of eradicating extreme poverty, last made at the MDG summit in September last year.
Stephen O'Brien, the UK international development minister for Africa, said the conference must not miss the chance to give much-needed impetus to the stalled Doha trade negotiations. The so-called Doha development round that began in 2001 was supposed to bring benefits to the developing world but has stalled as key players – the US, the EU, China, Brazil and India – have refused to make concessions.
"We cannot miss the chance to progress the Doha agreement to bring free and fair market access to the developing world and boost growth in the world economies," said O'Brien. "If the entire G20 extended duty and quota-free access to their markets and goods, this would increase the amount of bilateral trade and lift an estimated 3 million people out of poverty at very little cost to these nations."
Whether the goal of halving the number of LDCs is realistic or not, aid groups believe it is important for the conference to set out ambitious targets to shake people out of their complacency, codify good practices, and mobilise political will.
Barry Coates, executive director of Oxfam, New Zealand, who will attend the conference as part of the NGO community, called for immediate steps from rich countries that would help LDCs. Echoing O'Brien, Coates said a good first step would be to allow duty free access for LDC exports, which account for only 1% of world trade.
Coates also argues for further debt cancellation. There was some debt cancellation in 2009, but new debts have also been taken on, particularly in response to the global financial crisis.
The UN said as of late last year, 20 least developed countries were in a situation of "debt distress". The financial crisis, it said, has caused the debt burden to rise. In arguing for a predictable source of finance, Coates said a tax on financial transactions – the so-called Tobin tax – was gaining real political traction.
For Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, managing director at the World Bank, who will be attending the conference as an observer, it was important that the meeting should focus on helping LDCs grow at a robust rate.
"The issue is whether they are performing economically," she said "We need to focus on the sources of growth. Those that have been conflict-affected, the question is how do we help them deal with post-conflict. Those countries that are stable, the question is how do we help them grow."
Okonjo-Iweala said African countries – which make up 33 of the 48 LDCs – should use agriculture to create employment.
"Fifty percent of arable land is on the African continent," she said. "They have the potential to provide food for themselves and can go beyond that, modernise their agriculture and adding value. Instead of just exporting the raw material, process the food and add value to it on the continent. Instead of simply exporting the mangoes and pineapples, turn them into fruit juices.
"Mali is a good example with mangoes and has doubled its exports of mangoes. Ethiopia is trying to do that with coffee and Rwanda is moving along the same lines. We should concentrate on specific steps these countries should take and what concrete steps developed countries should take."

There are 48 least developed countries

Africa: 33 countries.
Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauretania, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia.
Asia and the Pacific: 14 countries
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia, Kiribati, Lao Peoples Democratic Republic, Nepal, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and Yemen.
Latin America and the Caribbean: 1 country
Haiti

Characteristics of LDCs

Average income of less than $475 (£288) a person a year. Weak human resources as measured by nutrition, infant mortality, secondary school environment and adult literacy. High economic vulnerability as measured by factors such as population size, remoteness, share of agriculture, and homelessness due to natural disasters. A country "graduates" from LDC status if the figure hits $900.

Main challenges facing LDCs

High levels of poverty: more than half the 800 million people in the LDCs live on less than a dollar a day. Women in LDCs have a one in 16 chance of dying in childbirth, compared to one in 3,500 in North America.
Food insecurity: More than 300 million Africans are food insecure.
Economic vulnerability: LDCs are highly dependent on external sources of funding, including official development assistance, workers' remittances and foreign direct investment. This overly exposes them to external shocks such as the global financial crisis.
Environmental vulnerability: While they contribute least to climate change, LDCs are among the groups of countries most affected by it. Many LDCs are also small islands whose very survival is threatened by rising sea levels.
Source: UN