Volcanic Eruption

Mount Belinda, located on the Montagu island in South Sandwich Islands in the Atlantic is spewing its guts these days. The South Sandwich Islands are situated approximately between the southern tip of South America and mainland Antarctica. What’s so special is that eruptions on ice sheets are exceedingly rare. The island is quite close to the Antarctic land mass, covered completely by ice and snow, glaciers extend over the land and form steep vertical cliffs where they meet the ocean, and is home to a large population of chinstrap penguins.

The picture shows clearly why they are called chinstrap as they have a thin curved line of black feathers running under the chin. Of the several penguin species, they are one of the most common penguins in the world actually. Most of us are used to seeing chinstrapless-penguins normally I think. Well back to the eruption, it was first noticed on November 30, 2005 and we have already some really breathtaking pictures from satellite. Volcano experts are understandably absolutely thrilled….

"I'd give my right arm to be down there now," says John Smellie, a volcano expert at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. "It's very rare that we get to make direct observations of eruptions under ice sheets."

This is a satellite picture of the island (Image Courtesy NASA Earth Observatory), taken in 2004. Belinda has been showing signs of activity since 2001.

Woman Smart, Man Smarter

Researchers Dr. Paul Irwing and Prof. Richard Lynn in UK have recently concluded and published a large scale study of gender differences w.r.t intelligence. They gave IQ tests to 80,000 people and a further group of 20,000. Fairly large numbers. They concluded that men were, on an average, 5 points ahead of women on the IQ scale. Moreover, this difference increased with increasing scores. The study is published in the British Journal of Psychology.

The study involved different age groups, and interestingly, up to the age of 14, no difference in IQ could be measured between girls and boys. The difference emerges in adulthood, and kept getting wider and wider as higher IQ scores were compared. For instance, twice as many men than women had an IQ score of 125. At the score of 155 however, there were 5.5 times men than women.


Several reactions to this news were observed. Some (females) wanted to rubbish the comparison altogether, saying the discussion is inherently divisive and politically incorrect, while others (the males) were happy to hear this information, and glad that they were getting the right kind of positive media exposure. General questions like are these tests still biased for western audiences, gender-differences, also cropped up, as did several reasons for why females are lagging behind in the test, one interesting one being they don’t really push themselves too hard for such a test anyway, while men would be falling over each other trying to outdo everyone else… (makes sense I think). Also, it was felt we live in a male-driven world, it is the men who are given the chance to achieve more, and are less prone to repetitive tasks. Some people remarked that a group of males devised a test, which was given by males, evaluated by males, and concluded by males that males were more intelligent. There were some charming confessions by people who said they had scored high in their IQ tests when they were small but had done so many stupid things lately they suspected the tests to have anything to do with intelligence at all. Suspicions were also cast on the journal editor (probably a male himself). Another point was that was raised was that why are women psychologists not running around trying to prove women are smarter than men ? Why is it only the males ? A rather wry observation by a female was “granted there are more exceptionally clever men than women, but there are also more exceptionally stupid men than women too”.

I wonder what Harry Belafonte (singer of Man Smart, Woman Smarter) would say to all this?

Life after 100

Most people will never live to that age. The average age in the developed world being around 75. However, there a few populations in the world where living up to 100, is actually rather common. Sardinia, (Those who don’t know where it is click here), is a small island in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Italy. The routine line during a toast is..”May you live to be a 100 years!”. According to Emma Bird, in Growing Healthy in Sardinia, "five of the world’s 40 oldest people live in Sardinia and some 135 people per million live to see their 100th birthday, while the western average is nearer 75."

Whatever have these people been doing ? Outliving normal people by more than 20 odd years at least ?

Most are shepherds on the move, active throughout their lives, and eating meat and cheese and drinking red wine regularly. Staying purposeful and active is important.
However, they are a slim people, not overindulging in food, as for a long life everything must be "Normalissima!" This is also interesting as calorie restriction has been found by scientists to be a contributer to longer lifespans. What scientists have found now, these people have known for years.

Killer gas to Clean fuel

Carbon monoxide + steaming hot water = hydrogen

What a nice way to produce wonderful fuel! It may become reality with the sequencing of the genome of a strange microbe (Carboxydothermus hydrogenoformans Z-2901) that lives in boiling hot springs of the volcanic Kunashir island in Russia. It possesses upto five different carbon monoxide dehydrogenases, while most other species found so far have only a single one. This really should be a microbe to look out for in the future.