Will We Be Able to Prevent an Asteroid Strike and More Questions From Our Readers
Does lightning strike ships at sea and why does American English differ from British English?
- By Smithsonian Magazine
- Smithsonian magazine, January 2013, Subscribe
Will we ever really be able to deflect a comet or asteroid that has targeted us for extinction?
Bruce McPhee
West Yarmouth, Massachusetts
We can deflect such objects big enough to cause regional damage; the key element is how long a warning we have. Even with only a decade or so, we might deflect an asteroid of perhaps 100 meters in diameter, using spacecraft or nuclear weapons. With sufficient warning—say 50 years—we could deflect an object several hundred meters in diameter. Extinction-scale threats have been ruled out for the next few hundred years, so you can relax.
Tim Spahr
Director, Minor Planet Center, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Why are penguins not found in the Arctic and polar bears not in the Antarctic? Why can’t either be relocated to the other habitat?
Lynne William
Douglasville, Georgia
Polar bears evolved in the Northern Hemisphere, penguins in the Southern Hemisphere. Many polar species have never dispersed naturally from one pole to the other because they can’t traverse the warm habitats in between. Transplanting these species might disrupt their respective ecosystems and could lead to extinctions.
Kristofer Helgen
Zoologist, National Museum of Natural History
Does lightning strike ships at sea? I’ve been on a ship amid a spectacular electrical storm, with many strikes all around us, but the ship remained unstruck.
Raleigh Bryan Miller Jr.
McMinnville, Tennessee
Ships do get struck by lightning, but passengers may not even notice, because ships usually have grounding equipment, and steel hulls readily dissipate the electrical charge. Of course, smaller vessels made of nonmetallic materials are far more prone to damage.
Hugh Reichardt
Station Manager, Smithsonian Marine Station, Fort Pierce, Florida
Why does American English differ from British English and Australian English?
Matt LaRock
Lakewood, Colorado
Language is learned individually and subject to subtle changes that each speaker introduces. These changes accumulate as people tend to accommodate to the usage of others in the community. Over time, the speech of communities that have little contact drifts apart. Accents are the natural result of the creative dynamic of human language that makes it such a powerful tool for expression and communication.
Ives Goddard
Senior Linguist Emeritus, National Museum of Natural History
I’ve seen inanimate objects—bits of string, metal, plastic—in the mounds made by night crawlers. Why do they collect these things?
Janice Sikes
Springfield, Oregon
Night crawlers’ mounds, or middens, store food and protect their burrow openings. The worms build them by dragging plant material and adding it to their casts (waste). But since they can’t see, and can’t tell the difference between natural and synthetic materials, they sometimes drag in odd bits.
Chih-Han Chang
Smithsonian Fellow, Museum Support Center
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Comments (2)
After a career of trying to find and use clear, transparent roads to students' general understanding of language, I was dismayed by the nearly arch abstruseness of your answer to the reader who asked "Why does American English differ from British English and Australian English?" The straightforwardly phrased question might have tipped you off to try a plainer answer than that almost abstract jargon: "learned individually," "subject to," "accumulate," "accommodate," "little contact," and, most glaringly, "creative dynamic." The reader was not inquiring bout "powerful tools for expression and communication." It shouldn'ta been that hard for a senior linguist emeritus to answer in plain English. The tendency (too common with experts) almost ratifies Nabokov's acid description (1957) of "linguistics, that ascetic fraternity of phonemes" whose work will someday apply mainly to languages "spoken only by certain elaborate machines." From Dwight Bolinger, most humanistic of linguists and maybe the wisest (partly paraphrased; his book isn't to hand): "Unless we [linguists] take seriously our responsibility to inform the general public about language, we have only ourselves to blame" for the persistence of pernicious ignorance about it.
Posted by Mike Bell on January 11,2013 | 10:19 AM
Re January issue, Ask Smithsonian section, the question on relocating polar bears to Antarctic areas was shot down by Kristopher Helgen because he can't look outside the box. If polar bears are heading towards extinction due to global warming, a test population moved to the Antarctic might be able to adapt and prevent this extinction. The reader did not suggest ALL polar bears be moved there. This is an idea that deserves some real consideration.
Posted by Flo Samuels on January 1,2013 | 10:01 AM