Tremors turns 30, the most perfect B movie creature feature ever made
The film faltered at the box office but amassed a huge cult following over the years.

JENNIFER OUELLETTE - 1/19/2020

It has been 30 years since the release of Tremors, an unabashed love letter to the B-movie creature features of the 1950s that remains as fresh today as it was three decades ago. The film is sheer perfection and ranks among my personal favorite films of all time. As Ars' own Nathan Matisse wrote last year, "If B-movie horror with flashes of comedic brilliance and a few edge-of-your-seat scares interests you, viewers likely can't do much better than Tremors."

(Major spoilers below, because it's been 30 years.)

Writers S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock came up with the initial idea for Tremors in the early 1980s while making educational safety videos for the US Navy. They climbed a desert boulder for a shot and pondered what they would do if, for some reason, they were stuck there due to some outside force they eventually dubbed "Land Sharks." A friend of theirs, Ron Underwood, was a documentary director for National Geographic and helped them develop a believable creature for what would become the script for Tremors. Wilson and Maddock hit the big time with their 1986 film Short Circuit (directed by John Badham), which enabled them to finally bring Tremors to the silver screen.

The story takes place in the tiny fictional desert town of Perfection, Nevada—population 15, at least at the start of the film. Local handymen/BFFs Val (Kevin Bacon) and Earl (Fred Ward) are eking out an existence doing odd jobs for the residents in exchange for all that personal freedom. Said residents include Walter (Victor Chong) who runs the local market; teenaged horror Melvin (Bobby Jacoby); single mom Nancy (Charlotte Stewart), who sells pottery and has a daughter, Mindy (Ariana Richards); a doctor, Jim (Conrad Bachmann), and his wife, Megan (Bibi Besch); rancher Miguel (Tony Genaro); a survivalist couple, Burt and Heather Gummer (Michael Gross and Reba McEntire); Nestor (Richard Marcus); and two elderly residents: Edgar Deems (Sunshine Parker) and "Old Fred" (Michael Dan Wagner), a farmer.

FURTHER READING Kevin Bacon shares the Tremors TV pilot—Val is washed, Graboids are hungry

There's also a grad student, Rhonda (Finn Carter), who is spending the summer monitoring her university's seismology equipment. She soon picks up on some very strange readings, right about the time Perfection's residents start dying under mysterious circumstances. Eventually, everyone discovers the culprits: four giant subterranean creatures that Walter dubs "graboids," since they "hunt" by sensing vibrations and shooting snake-like protrusions out of their mouths to grab their prey. From then on, it's humans vs. graboids in a battle of wits to determine the survival of the fittest.

Tremors debuted in theaters on January 19, 1990 and grossed a mere $3.7 million opening weekend, eventually eking out $16.6 million domestically against its modest $11 million budget. Both Maddock and Wilson criticized the marketing of the film, with Maddock calling the theatrical trailer "cringeworthy." (It actually is pretty bad.) Critics generally liked the film, praising the performances and how well the film walked the tonal tightrope between horror and humor.

Tremors really took off with its release on home video (and, subsequently, DVD and streaming), gaining a substantial cult following. Numerous bad sequels followed, all straight-to-video/DVD. In style and tone, they had more in common with the Sharknado franchise than the original film. There was Tremors 2: Aftershocks (1996), Tremors 3: Back to Perfection (2001), Tremors 4: The Legend Begins (2004), Tremors 5: Bloodlines (2015), and Tremors: A Cold Day in Hell (2018). A seventh installment, Tremors: Island Fury, is rumored to be in development. There was even a short-lived SyFy TV series in 2003, set just after the events of Tremors 3, that was abruptly cancelled after just 13 episodes.

I enjoy a cheesy SyFy flick as much as anyone, but none of the sequels even comes close to capturing the magic of the original Tremors. It's got a terrific cast of characters, for starters, all types one would expect to find in a town like Perfection. Burt's "UZI 4U" license plate and impassioned rants about eminent domain are just one example of many delightful details. The actors all nail their portrayals. (Special shoutout to Finn Carter's Rhonda, who is that rare gem in film: a believable working scientist.) It has an equally terrific script, with on-point dialogue that illuminates the intricate relationships among the residents, especially the inevitable tensions and arguments. ("I know, I know, he thinks he knows everything," Heather says soothingly to a disgruntled Burt after a face-off with Earl.)

Director Ron Underwood (who went on to make City Slickers and Mighty Joe Young) set the narrative up like a mystery, introducing us to the main characters and setting as they realize the threat that is coming for them. We don't see the graboids at all at first, just their victims. Val and Earl find Edgar Deems perched on an electrical tower, dead of dehydration. Something terrified him so much, despite his trusty Winchester rifle, that he chose to die slowly over days rather than come down.

Next, we see Old Fred working the hoe as his sheep start bleating in terror. The ground rumbles, and poor Fred is yanked underground. Val and Earl find his head and assume a serial killer is on the loose—especially when they discover the gory remains of two road workers. They find what appears to be a dead snake attached to the underside of their truck and finally encounter the first full-sized graboid while riding for help in nearby Bixby.

Underwood expertly boosts the suspense by revealing there are actually four graboids, then blocks off the one road out of town and takes away each alternate option as the creatures close in. Eventually the surviving residents of Perfection find themselves trapped on a cluster of boulders in the desert—the scenario that inspired the film—while the last two graboids lie in wait for them to either die of thirst, like Edgar, or attempt to run for safety and become lunch.

But it's the ingenious design of the graboids that really make the film for me—how the characters figure out the monsters' characteristics. Above all, the graboids are smart and capable of learning about their human prey and adapting accordingly. When humans hide in a car, they dig around the surrounding soil so the whole vehicle sinks underground. They do the same thing to loosen building foundations when the residents take refuge on their roofs. They dig a trap just as the humans are almost safely to the mountains, and so forth. The humans have to keep upping their game to survive, and the ingenious ways they outwit the monsters is a huge part of the film's delight.

Several years ago, SyFy attempted to revive the TV series, with Blumhouse Productions behind the project—even signing on Bacon to reprise his role as Val, focusing on what happened to him 25 years later. (Footloose might have catapulted Bacon to stardom, but Val ranks among his most career-defining performances). As Nathan Matisse wrote:

Val has clung to his hero days while the town of Perfection struggled to determine its next move. The show's Graboids' World theme park more closely resembles an aging regional destination than Disney World, and even the local cafe probably regrets changing its name to an inevitable Instagram thirst trap, Grab-A-Coffee.

But the network ended up passing on the pilot, although footage was shown at the 2019 ATX Television Festival last year. And it's sadly unlikely to find a home elsewhere. Ah well, at least we still have the original to watch and re-watch, hopefully for decades to come.

Listing image by Universal Picture

The first casualty: Edgar Deems (Sunshine Parker).

Val (Kevin Bacon) and Earl (Fred Ward) check with Doctor Jim (Conrad Bachmann) and his wife Megan (Bibi Besch) to determine Edgar's cause of death.

Old Fred (Michael Dan Wagner) becomes a graboid's lunch.

Roadworkers Howard (John Goodwin) and Carmine (John Pappas) scoff at Val and Earl's warnings.

Burt (Michael Gross) thinks it's some kind of snake.

PhD student Rhonda (Finn Carter) notices some odd seismic readings.

"That's how they get you."

Earl and Val realize the threat is underground.

The graboid opens its gaping maw.

"I found the ass end!" One graboid down, three to go.

That's a lot bigger than a snake.

Pole vaulting to Rhonda's truck, being sure to stay on the residual boulders.

Give Rhonda a hand with the driving, guys.

Val saves Little Mindy (Ariana Richards) and mom Nancy (Charlotte Stewart

Rhonda in a tight spot.

R.I.P. Walter Chang (Victor Wong).

Val and Earl are distraught that they couldn't save Walter.

Melvin (Bobby Jacoby) panics.

You want survivalists Burt and Heather (Reba McEntire) on your side in a gunfight.

Second graboid bites the dust.

Victory lap: "Picked the wrong goddamned rec room to break into, didn't ya!"

The survivors end up cornered on a cluster of boulders by the graboids lying in wait.

Preparing to go graboid fishing with homemade bombs.

Kabloom! Three down, one to go.

"This one ain't dumb

Val offers himself as bait.

"Can you fly?"

Answer: nope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-zvVozefYw

Astronomers find an oddball asteroid entirely inside the orbit of Venus
"Getting past the orbit of Venus must have been challenging."
ERIC BERGER - 1/20/2020

Enlarge / The Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in California.
Caltech Optical Observatories

Astronomers have found nearly 1 million asteroids in our Solar System, with the vast majority located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

It is far rarer to find asteroids with orbits closer to the Sun, and especially inside the orbit of Earth, due to Jupiter's gravitational influence. There are only about 20 known asteroids with orbits entirely inside that of Earth's. They are called Atira asteroids.

Many of these Atira asteroids have orbits that are substantially tilted away from the plane of the Solar System, suggesting past encounters with Mercury or Venus.
A rare find

Until now, scientists have theorized that Vatira asteroids might exist—those with orbits inside Venus—but had yet to find one. They would be difficult to observe because their orbits would bring them close to the Sun, leaving only a short window to find them in the dusk or dawn sky. And also because presumably they are quite rare due to the gravitational challenge of squeezing into a stable orbit so near the Sun.  

Enlarge / 2020 AV2 orbits entirely within the orbit of Venus.
Bryce Bolin/Caltech

But now astronomers have found a Vatira asteroid for the first time. The body, called 2020 AV2, was found earlier this month by the California Institute of Technology's Zwicky Transient Facility, and confirmed by other observatories around the world.

"Getting past the orbit of Venus must have been challenging," said George Helou, a Caltech astronomer and co-investigator at the Zwicky facility, in a news release. "The only way it will ever get out of its orbit is if it gets flung out via a gravitational encounter with Mercury or Venus, but more likely it will end up crashing on one of those two planets."

Astronomers say the asteroid spans about 1 to 3 kilometers in diameter and has an orbit tilted about 15 degrees relative to the plane of the Solar System. During its 151-day elongated orbit, it remains within the path of Venus while also approaching the orbit of Mercury. It likely was thrown into the intervenusian orbit by an encounter with another planet.

The Zwicky camera, attached to a telescope at Palomar Observatory in Southern California, is well suited to finding asteroids because it scans the entire sky rapidly and can observe asteroids during their short-lived appearances in the night sky.

FURTHER READING 

It looks like NASA is getting serious about finding hazardous asteroids

Why Didn't the Allies Bomb Auschwitz?

By Mindy Weisberger - Senior Writer 

A new PBS documentary probes the deliberation behind the historic decision.

Train tracks converge at the entrance to the Nazi 

death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. In this photo,

 taken in 1945, the tracks are strewn with snow-covered 

personal effects that belonged to the camp's inmates.
(Image: © Alamy)

In the spring of 1944, Allied forces received disturbing intelligence about horrific atrocities taking place at Auschwitz-Birkenau in southern Poland, a place now known as one of the Nazis' most brutal extermination camps.

Two escaped Jewish prisoners revealed first-hand knowledge of the horrors they experienced, and the Allies faced a terrible choice at a pivotal moment during the war, when their military resources were already strained to the breaking point.

Should they deploy aircraft to bomb the death camp, despite a substantial risk of killing trapped prisoners? Or were the military cost and potential loss of life too great, when the outcome of World War II itself hung in the balance? In a new PBS documentary, "Secrets of the Dead: Bombing Auschwitz," historians probe the deliberations of Allied leaders: Should they perform a moral but militarily fruitless action, or concentrate their might on crushing the Nazi war machine for good?

Established in 1940 near the town of Oświęcim, Poland, as a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners, Auschwitz's inmate numbers skyrocketed as the war progressed. In August 1944, Auschwitz held around 400,000 people: 205,000 were Jews and 195,000 were non-Jews — Poles, Soviet POWs, Roma and other ethnic groups, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. (By the war's end an estimated 1.1 million people had died there.)

When Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped Auschwitz in April 1944, they brought with them the first eyewitness testimony describing gas chambers and the Nazis' use of mass murder at an unthinkable scale. Their detailed account to Slovakia's Jewish underground, first known as the Vrba-Wetzler report, was later distributed as The Auschwitz Protocol, according to PBS.

From May through July of 1944, copies of the report were sent to neutral Switzerland's War Refugee Board; to the War Refugee Board headquarters in Washington, D.C.; and to leaders of the Allied forces, including the American assistant secretary of war, John McCloy. Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, was so troubled by the report that he issued a memo recommending a bombing raid on the death camp.

But ultimately, no bombers were sent to Auschwitz. Though Allied raids were already targeting the German chemical plant IG Farben, which was located just 4 miles (6 kilometers) from the death camp and even used Auschwitz prisoners for labor, several factors led the Allies to reject Auschwitz as a potential target, said Tami Davis Biddle, a professor of history and national security strategy at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Sketch of the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria from

 the English-language version of the Vrba-Wetzler report, published 

November 1944.

 (Image credit: Executive Office of the United States War Refugee Board)

An uncertain outcome

One reason can be traced to widespread anti-Semitism in the U.S. and the U.K. during WWII, fanned by a highly effective Nazi propaganda campaign suggesting that Jews were manipulating the Allied war machine, Biddle told Live Science.

"Politicians got nervous if it looked like they were making special efforts on behalf of the Jews," Biddle said. In fact, many figures in American leadership — Jewish and non-Jewish alike — agreed at the time that maintaining public support of the war effort required downplaying emphasis on Jewish interests, said Michael Berenbaum, a professor of Jewish studies at American Jewish University in Los Angeles.

"There was a fear that Americans would support the war effort less if they thought it was war about the Jews," Berenbaum told Live Science.

There was also the question of how accurately Auschwitz could be bombed from the air. Allied military officers had some aerial photos of the camp, and the Auschwitz Protocol provided more intel about the buildings, so bombers could pick targets that would cause fewer casualties. But aerial bombing during WWII was notoriously inaccurate; so-called precision bombing, as we know it today, was impossible, and a raid could have killed far more prisoners than it saved, Biddle said.

"You would need to drop 220 bombs on each of the four crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau to have a 90% chance of one of them hitting each crematorium," Biddle said.


Aerial photographs such as this one, taken above Auschwitz on April 4,1944,

 gave the Allies limited information about the layout and distribution of buildings.

 (Image credit: Alamy)

What's more, assigning bombers to an Auschwitz raid would divert military resources away from the front lines, Biddle said.

"We look back on World War II and we tend to think, well, it was probably obvious that we were going to win. It wasn't," Biddle said. The window in 1944 in which it was possible to strike at Auschwitz was also one of the most intense periods of fighting on the European continent; Allied forces were scrambling to move armies eastward, shut down German rocket-launching sites and prevent a resurgence of the Luftwaffe — the German air force.

"The military was very jealous of its resources. It's pretty much fighting for its life in 1944," Biddle said. "On the one hand, there's the case for diverting resources to go hit this target. On the other hand, there's this sense that we've just got to defeat the Germans no matter what, and focus everything on the military defeat."

Even if the Allies had bombed Auschwitz, it wouldn't have been a "magic bullet" that saved millions of lives, Berenbaum said. By the time the Allies had what they needed to proceed with a raid, it would have been too late for most of the Holocaust's 11 million victims. Most of the death camps had already been shut down by the retreating Nazis; at that point, about 90% of the people murdered by the Third Reich had already been killed, Berenbaum said.

Nevertheless, there's no denying that bombing Auschwitz would have sent a resounding message that such terrible atrocities would not go unanswered.

"I wish we had done it," Biddle said. "I wish that we could look back on our record of the war and say, we understood how awful this was, and we want to make a moral statement."

"Secrets of the Dead: Bombing Auschwitz" premieres Jan. 21 at 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings), pbs.org/secrets and the PBS Video app to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Related: 

Photos: The Flying Bombs of Nazi German

Photos: Escape Tunnel at Holocaust Death Site

In Photos: Girls' Hut Found at Nazi Death Camp

Images: Missing Nazi Diary Resurfaces

Originally published on Live Science.

Could Scientists 'Hack' the Zika Virus to Kill

Brain Cancer?

By Nicoletta Lanese - Staff Writer 

Could Zika be used as a cancer treatment?  

   

(Image: © Shutterstock)

The moquito-spread Zika virus known for its links to brain damage in babies born to infected mothers has the potential to target and destroy brain cancer, scientists have found.

New research has revealed that the Zika virus breaks into brain cells by using a special molecular key, and scientists think the virus could be tweaked so that it infects only brain cancer cells, leaving  healthy cells unharmed.

The aggressive brain cancer glioblastoma often defies standard cancer treatment because the disease transforms normal brain cells into stem cells. While typical neurons stop dividing after so many replications, stem cells can reproduce indefinitely and grow a whole new tumor from just a handful of cells. Patients typically survive less than 20 months after being diagnosed with glioblastoma; even if the cancer can be forced into remission, the tumors typically regrow and take the life of the patient within 12 months. 

But where standard treatments fail, the Zika virus may offer a new strategy to wipe out the deadly disease, according to a pair of studies published Jan. 16 in the journals Cell Reports and Cell Stem Cell.   

Related: The 9 Deadliest Viruses on Earth

"While we would likely need to modify the normal Zika virus to make it safer to treat brain tumors, we may also be able to take advantage of the mechanisms the virus uses to destroy cells to improve the way we treat glioblastoma," senior author Dr. Jeremy Rich, director of neuro-oncology and of the Brain Tumor Institute at UC San Diego Health, said in a statement. (Rich and his colleagues authored the Cell Stem Cell paper.) 

When the Zika virus infects developing fetuses, the virus stunts brain development by targeting neural stem cells and stunting their proliferation. Rich and his co-authors wondered whether the virus' strategy could be co-opted to shrink brain tumors. In a 2017 study published in The Journal of Experimental Medicine, the team put their theory to the test and found that the Zika virus actually prefers to infect glioblastoma stem cells over normal brain cells — at least in petri dishes and mouse models of the disease. The reason behind this preference remained a mystery, until now. 

To learn how Zika breaches the membranes of cancer cells, the team scanned the virus' surface for integrins — receptors that viruses often use to latch onto their victims' cells and slip inside. Having identified various integrins on the viral surface, the researchers then blocked each with a protein. Then, they unleashed the modified virus into a lab dish holding a mix of normal brain stem cells and cancerous ones. If a particular integrin helped Zika hack into brain cells, blocking the receptor should stop the infectious virus in its tracks.

Through trial-and-error, the team learned that an integrin called αvβ5 serves as the key that lets Zika into brain cells.    

"When we blocked other integrins, there was no difference," Rich said. "But with αvβ5, blocking it with an antibody almost completely blocked the ability of the virus to infect brain cancer stem cells and normal brain stem cells." 

Related: 5 Facts About Brain Cancer

According to the study, αvβ5 consists of two halves: αv and β5. The former half appears in abundance on brain stem cells, which may help to explain how the virus targets both healthy and cancerous brain stem cells. The latter half, however, mostly appears on cancer cells and renders tumors more aggressive, regarding how quickly they can spread. 

For this reason, glioblastomas may be more vulnerable to Zika infection than normal brain stem cells. The team confirmed the idea by injecting Zika into human brain organoids — tiny models of the human brain grown in a lab dish. In the mini-brains, the virus reliably infected cancer cells more often than healthy cells. But without an intact αvβ5 receptor, the virus could not infect the cells at all.     

The second study, published in Cell Reports, also confirmed that αvβ5 grants Zika its cancer-crushing powers. 

Using the CRISPR gene-editing technique, the researchers selectively deleted specific genes from glioblastoma stem cells and exposed each mutant tumor to the Zika virus. When they deleted the gene that contained instructions to build αvβ5, Zika could no longer grab hold of the cancer cells. The discovery "made perfect sense" because αvβ5 appears in such large quantities on neural stem cells, the virus' primary target, senior author Tariq Rana, professor and chief of the Division of Genetics in the Department of Pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center, said in the statement.   

Related: 7 Odd Things That Raise Your Risk of Cancer (and 1 That Doesn't)

With the knowledge that αvβ5 may be a soft spot in aggressive glioblastomas, the researchers now aim to genetically modify the Zika virus to target the cancer while sparing healthy cells.  

Other deadly viruses could also serve as weapons against brain cancer. In a study published in 2018 in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers treated glioblastoma patients with a genetically modified poliovirus and found that more than 20% remained alive three years later, as compared with 4 percent of patients who received a standard treatment, Live Science reported at the time. As the field of virotherapy continues to grow, once-deadly diseases may prove to be powerful weapons in the fight against cancer.  

Here's What Scientists Know About 'Screen Time' and Your Health

By Byron Reeves - Stanford University, Nilam Ram - Pennsylvania State University, '

Thomas N. Robinson - Stanford University 

 

Humans are bombarded by digital media 24/7. Is that a problem?

(Image: © Bruce Rolff/Shutterstock)

There's a lot of talk about digital media. Increasing screen time has created worries about media's impacts on democracy, addiction, depression, relationships, learning, health, privacy and much more. The effects are frequently assumed to be huge, even apocalyptic.

Scientific data, however, often fail to confirm what seems true based on everyday experiences. In study after study, screen time is often not correlated with important effects at a magnitude that matches the concerns and expectations of media consumers, critics, teachers, parents, pediatricians and even the researchers themselves. For example, a recent review of over 200 studies about social media concluded there was almost no effect of greater screen time on psychological well-being. A comprehensive study of adolescents reported small effects of screen time on brain development, and no relationship between media use and cognitive performance. A review of 20 studies about the effects of multitasking with media — that is, using two or more screens at the same time — showed small declines in cognitive performance because of multitasking but also pointed out new studies that showed the opposite.

As communication, psychological and medical researchers interested in media effects, we are interested in how individuals' engagement with digital technology influences peoples' thoughts, emotions, behaviors, health and well-being.

Moving beyond 'screen time'

Has the power of media over modern life been overstated? Probably not, but no one knows, because there is a severe lack of knowledge about what people are actually seeing and doing on their screensIndividuals all around the world are now all looking at pretty much the same screens and spending a lot of time with them. However, the similarities between us end there. Many different kinds of applications, games and messages flow across people's screens. And, because it is so easy to create customized personal threads of experiences, each person ends up viewing very different material at different times. No two people share the same media experiences.

To determine the effects of media on people's lives, whether beneficial or harmful, requires knowledge of what people are actually seeing and doing on those screens. But researchers often mistakenly depend on a rather blunt metric — screen time.

Reports of screen time, the most common way to assess media use, are known to be terribly inaccurate and describe only total viewing time. Today, on a single screen, you can switch instantly between messaging a neighbor, watching the news, parenting a child, arranging for dinner delivery, planning a weekend trip, talking on an office video conference and even monitoring your car, home irrigation and lighting. Add to that more troublesome uses — bullying a classmate, hate speech or reading fabricated news. Knowing someone's screen time — their total dose of media — will not diagnose problems with any of that content.

A media solution based only on screen time is like medical advice to someone taking multiple prescription medications to reduce their total number of pills by half. Which medications and when?

Complex and unique nature of media use

What would be a better gauge of media consumption than screen time? Something that better captures the complexities of how individuals engage with media. Perhaps the details about specific categories of content — the names of the programs, software and websites - would be more informative. Sometimes that may be enough to highlight problems — playing a popular game more than intended, frequent visits to a suspicious political website or too much social time on Facebook.

Tracking big categories of content, however, is still not that helpful. My one hour of Facebook, for example, could be spent on self-expression and social comparison; yours could be filled with news, shopping, classes, games and videos. Further, our research finds that people now switch between content on their smartphones and laptops every 10 to 20 seconds on average. Many people average several hundred different smartphone sessions per day. The fast cadence certainly influences how people converse with each other and how engaged we are with information. And each bit of content is surrounded by other kinds of material. News read on Facebook sandwiches political content between social relationships, each one changing the interpretation of the other.

A call for a Human Screenome Project

In this era of technology and big data, we need a DVR for digital life that records the entirety of individuals' screen media experiences - what we call the screenome, analogous to the genome, microbiome and other "omes" that define an individual's unique characteristics and exposures.

An individual's screenome includes apps and websites, the specific content observed and created, all of the words, images and sounds on the screens, and their time of day, duration and sequencing. It includes whether the content is produced by the user or sent from others. And it includes characteristics of use, such as variations in how much one interacts with a screen, how quickly one switches between content, scrolls through screens, and turns the screen on and off.

Without knowledge of the whole screenome, no one — including researchers, critics, educators, journalists or policymakers — can accurately describe the new media chaos. People need much better data — for science, policy, parenting and more. And it needs to be collected and supported by individuals and organizations who are motivated to share the information for all to analyze and apply.

The benefits from studying the human genome required developing the field of genomics. The same will be true for the human screenome, the unique individual record of experiences that constitute psychological and social life on digital devices. Researchers now have the technologies to begin a serious study of screenomics, which we describe in the journal Nature. Now we need the data — a collective effort to produce, map and analyze a large and informative set of screenomes. A Human Screenome Project could inform academics, health professionals, educators, parents, advocacy groups, tech companies and policymakers about how to maximize the potential of media and remedy its most pernicious effects.

[Like what you've read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation's daily newsletter.]

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Ancient Australian Crystals Unlock History of Earth's First Magnetic Field


By Rafi Letzter - Staff Writer

It was a lot more powerful than anyone believed.

An image shows one of the tiny zircon crystals

found in Australia on a US dime. Even smaller 

particles within the zircon encode data about the 

state of the Earth's magnetic field at the time the crystal formed.
(Image: © University of Rochester / John Tarduno)


Tiny Crystals in Australia are helping scientists unlock the ancient history of our planet's first magnetic field, which disappeared hundreds of millions of years ago. And the crystals show that this field was a lot more powerful than anyone believed. That, in turn, could help answer a question about why life emerged on Earth.

Those tiny, old crystals are locked in rocks that date to well over half a billion years ago. At the time, tiny magnetic particles floated in the molten rock. But as that rock cooled, the particles, which aligned to the magnetic field orientation at the time, locked into place. And those particles still sit in a pose suggesting that they were influenced by a much more powerful magnetic field than scientists had assumed, a new study reveals.

Earth's magnetic field is generated by the planet's solid iron inner core spinning in a liquid-iron outer core. Extending far beyond our atmosphere, this field protects the planet from dangerous particles blasting through space, such as solar wind and cosmic rays. But because its visible effects on the planet's surface are so minimal, studying the field's long history is difficult. However, this history is important for understanding the future of our own planet and other planets in the universe. We know our planet has had a strong magnetic shield for a long time, because it kept its surface water and sprouted life. Otherwise, cosmic radiation would have blasted both life and water off the surface long ago. In that scenario, Earth would look a lot like Mars, where the old magnetic field collapsed as the planet cooled and its core stopped spinning, according to a statement from the researchers.

Earth has had a magnetic core for 4.2 billion years, according to the new study. But until 565 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs arrived and a bit before complex life emerged in the Cambrian explosion, that magnetic core worked completely differently. At that point, there was no inner core. But magnesium oxide, which had dissolved into the all-liquid core during the same giant impact that created Earth's moon, was slowly moving out of the core and into the mantle. That movement of magnesium generated movement in the liquid core that created Earth's early magnetic field.

When the magnesium oxide ran out, the field almost collapsed, researchers believe. But the solid inner core formed at around the same time and saved life on Earth.

Conventional wisdom held that the field produced by the old, magnesium-oxide magnet was a lot weaker than the one we have now. But studying those ancient ancient zircon crystals, which formed when the old magnetic field still suffused the planet, indicates that this was wrong.

"This research is telling us something about the formation of a habitable planet," John Tarduno, an Earth scientist at the University of Rochester and author of the new paper, said in the statement. "One of the questions we want to answer is why Earth evolved as it did, and this gives us even more evidence that the magnetic shielding was recorded very early on the planet."

The paper was published today (Jan. 20) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Why Does Earth Have an Atmosphere?
What Will Happen to Earth When the Sun Dies?
How Is Earth's Age Calculated?

Originally published on Live Science.