Search the Internet for “the next asteroid to hit earth” and you’ll find a litany of meteoric anxieties and galactic hyperbole. Reporting on the “QQ47” asteroid in 2003, CNN.com devolved into hysterics, warning that “A giant asteroid is heading for Earth and could hit in 2014” and “On impact, it could have the effect of 20 million Hiroshima atomic bombs.” Not to miss a scoop, The Daily Mailalerted us of planet-clobberer “1999 RQ36” which “has a 1-in-1,000 chance of actually hitting the Earth at some point before the year 2200, but is most likely to hit us on 24th September 2182.” At “more than 1,800 feet across,” author Niall Firth explains, the asteroid “would cause widespread devastation and possible mass extinction.”

In light of the frequent news of earth-bound space junk that, like a meteor shower, usually flashes and flares out in the atmosphere of our consciousness, wouldn’t it be nice to have a tool that calculated the actual effects of an asteroid impact? Your wishes have been answered by the earth and atmospheric sciences department at Purdue University, which commissioned the web-based program Impact Earth! 

Impact Earth! is like a mash-up between Angry Birds and Armageddon, an interface that allows you to tweak the size, makeup, velocity, and impact site of an asteroid and volley it toward our unsuspecting, defenseless planet. After a brief animation, the program spits out perverse statistics like crater size, likelihood of tsunami, energy released (measured against megatons of TNT), and the time it takes for you to feel the shockwave. You can also learn about famous collisions in earth’s pockmarked history, such as Siberia’s Tunguska Fireball of 1908. All in all, it’s probably the most pornographic creation in astronomy in decades.

Purdue used the “near miss” of asteroid 2005 YU55 on November 8 to introduce Impact Earth! to the world. “YU55 would strike with a velocity of 11 miles per second,” according to Purdue’s press release, “Although it would begin to disintegrate as it passed through the atmosphere, the fragments would strike in a compact cluster that would blast out a crater 4 miles in diameter and 1,700 feet deep.” The report continues: “Sixty miles away from the impact site the heat from the fireball would cause extensive first-degree skin burns, the seismic shaking would knock down chimneys and the blast wave would shatter glass windows.” Good to know, good to know.

The interface reminds me of a Google Maps mashup/mapplet from a couple of years ago called Ground Zero that plays on the same premise—but with nukes.  Being linked to the Google Maps software gives Ground Zero an element of schadenfreude that Impact Earth! lacks. Namely, the ability to level the city of your choosing. Take that, Cleveland! Auf wiedersehn, Baden-Wurttemberg! Choose from eight different levels of ordinance, from the Hiroshima-sized 15 kiloton “Little Boy” to the 50-megaton Soviet hydrogen bomb “Tsar Bomba” and launch. It even allows you to see the effect of an asteroid, although in much less nuanced detail than Purdue’s software.

For the sake of illustration, the image you see above displays the blast radius of a 21-kiloton “Fat Man”—similar to the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan—if it were dropped on Purdue University. A mile and a half away, in downtown Layfayette, people would be suffering the sunburn-like discomfort of 1st degree burns.

Unfortunately the entire staff and student body of Purdue, including the earth and atmospheric sciences department, would survive for a maximum of 24 hours in such a situation.

Image a screenshot from Impact Earth! A version of this article was originally posted at The Eschatologist.

During my school years, my university implemented a new email filter. It wasn’t a censor, per se, since you were able to send any message you wished, regardless of swears or sexy words. However, it rated emails by how “hot” they were and a racy message incited a pop-up asking something to the effect of, “Are you sure you want to send this message as is? Your recipient may find some of the language offensive.” A mild message earned one chili pepper, a racier message earned two, and a message with a big gun like the F-word earned three spicy peppers and a more strongly worded caution against sending. It was a whole lot of fun to see what words piqued the attention of the censor program, and we spent hours testing the system with combinations of curses and scandalous language. Vagina, we were outraged to learn, earned a couple of peppers, but penis didn’t set off any alarms. Occasionally it was mystifying to type an ordinary message to a friend or colleague only to have the filter message pop up: “Are you sure you want to send this message as is?” You’d go back and read your email to find the mysterious naughty phrase that had set off the alarm, like I cocked my head or the exam was harder than I thought.

It looks like texters in Pakistan will have a similar hurdle to jump through while composing their mobile phone messages. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has dreamt up 1,500 “obnoxious” words to ban, according to The Guardian (Nov 17, 2011). It must have been quite a brainstorming session coming up with all the no-no words: everything from quickie to deposit to love pistol to flogging the dolphin. So no more asking your friend if she has time for a quickie lunch, your husband if he has made the check deposit yet, or your lover if he is done flogging the dolphin. And unfortunately for users, a flagged message won’t just get a few chili peppers tacked on, it will get the text blocked and, in the event of repeat offenses, service disconnected. “Mobile phone firms were ordered to stop messages including the offending words this week,” reports the London newspaper, “although tests by the Guardian suggested the blocking technology was not 100% effective.” (Just like my classmates and me, it seems Guardian editors couldn’t resist going straight to testing the system and snickering over which words were banned and which weren’t.)

The ban was enacted in response to consumer complaints about offensive texts, says a PTA spokesperson: “Nobody would like this happening to their young boy or girl.” I should think alerting kids to fun new dirty phrases like pocket pool and beat your meat wouldn’t be the most effective way to keep communications clean. But as Mashable (Nov 21, 2011) reports, “Pakistan is no stranger to digital bans from the government. In May 2010, the country blocked Facebook for two weeks after a competition to draw the Prophet Mohammed sparked controversy. YouTube was blocked temporarily in 2008 following news that images from a competition to draw the Prophet Mohammed had leaked onto the site.”

Sources: The Guardian, Mashable 

Images by tore_urnes and Emily Rachel Hildebrand, licensed under Creative Commons.

In the face of drought, humans have tried many methods to make storm clouds release their life-giving payload. Ancient Israelites tried fasting, others tried rain dancing. There’s a long history of precipitation-based prayer, including the fairly recent public exhortation by Texas Governor Rick Perry. But if a higher power isn’t answering, modern science may be the last resort. That’s why China, according to an article in Orion, has turned to cloud seeding to help alleviate its impending water management crisis.

There is some—albeit contentious—evidence that by launching chemicals into pregnant clouds, we can trick the sky into releasing its moisture early. As the theory goes, if you load a cloud with silver iodide—“either by aircraft flying overhead, or on-ground generators that send up plumes of vapor, or, in the case of the Chinese, by decades-old artillery,” explains Orion—the chemical binds to other water molecules in the cloud as ice. The particulate becomes heavy enough to turn into rainfall.

The entire venture is fascinating. Here are seven factoids to store for your next cocktail party. All un-attributed quotes are pulled from the article in Orion (not yet available online).

1. China employs a veritable army to control its weather. According to a dispatch from Asia Times Online, “each of China’s more than 30 provinces and province-level municipalities today boast a weather-modification base, employing more than 32,000 people, 7,100 anti-aircraft guns, 4,991 special rocket launchers and 30-odd aircraft across the country.”

2. “China faces serious water shortages caused primarily by overuse and population density. Shortages are particularly problematic in the north, where half the Chinese population lives with just 15 percent of the country’s water. The water available for each person is one-fourth the global average, and that portion is expected to shrink as China’s population continues to grow.”

3. “From 1967 to 1972, the U.S. even put weather modification to work during wartime, deploying the 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron to seed clouds over Laos. With plans to ‘make mud, not war,’ as one officer put it, they hoped that landslides and heavy rain along the Ho Chi Minh Trail would slow the movements of North Vietnamese troops.”

4. Indeed, the gods of weather are fickle. That’s why “the state of Wyoming has pumped more than $10 million over the last five years into trying to figure out whether cloud seeding actually increases precipitation.” Yao Zhanyu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, has found through statistical analysis that China’s precipitation has shown “an average 10 to 15 percent increase in rainfall over each of the last seven years.”

5. In Colorado, a different type of rain gun is used: a hail cannon. Hail cannons, allegedly, “use shock waves to hamper the formation of hailstones.” Like cloud seeding, the evidence of their efficacy is dubious.

6. Cloud seeding is one manifestation of a techno-scientific array of solutions to climate change called geoengineering. Simply, geoengineering is the human manipulation of natural macro-processes—tides, ocean salinization levels, precipitation—to address trends in climate change. According to the New York Times’ Green blog, everyday people and policy makers are starting to consider geoengineering a viable option.

7. “Silver iodide is considered a hazardous substance and toxic pollutant under the Clean Water Act, but scientists engaged in cloud seeding operations in the U.S. say the substance is used in concentrations low enough to be negligible.” Relieving?

Sources: Asia Times Online, Green, Orion (article not yet available online)