A Russian team searching for signs of life beneath a 14-million-year-old frozen Antarctic lake has had to halt drilling just a few meters from water, potentially damaging 20 years of work in the process.
The team — headed up by the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in St. Petersburg — had to call off work just 29 meters short of the end goal because the Antarctic winter is fast closing in. News that they plan to fill the 3,749-meter borehole with kerosene to prevent it from freezing will further trouble groups who fear continued research will contaminate the lake.
Alexei Turkeyev, chief of the Russian-run Vostok Station, told Reuters on Feb. 4: “It’s minus-40 degrees Celsius outside. But whatever, we’re working. We’re feeling good.” Unfortunately Turkeyev and his team were forced to pack up last-minute amid fears they would be stranded. Temperatures above Lake Vostok fall to as low as 89 degrees below zero Celsius during winter, the coldest recorded natural temperature on Earth.
The lake has been protected from the atmosphere and the other surrounding 150 subglacial lakes by a 4-kilometer thick ice cap. What lies beneath the mammoth sheet of ice may provide answers to what Earth was like before the Ice Age and how life has evolved.
Most importantly, Lake Vostok appears to be incredibly similar to the frozen lakes of Jupiter’s Europa satellite and Saturn’s Enceladus. As Wired UK reported earlier this week, NASA and the ESA have already planned a joint mission to explore Europa’s lake in 2020. If life is found in Vostok, the implications for the possibility of extraterrestrial life on Europa and Enceladus are huge.
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Drilling has been relatively simple for the first 3 kilometers;. However as the team neared the bottom of the ice layer, it found the structure to be made up of huge monocrystals, hard like glass and a meter each in diameter. As a result, progress has been slow in recent weeks — just 1.6 meter drilled each day — and it was impossible to complete the task in time despite the team working round the clock.
About.com Geography gives 195, but goes on to point out that there are “dozens” of territories or colonies (sic) that are not real “countries” in their reckoning such as Bermuda and Puerto Rico. Worldatlas.com gives a figure anywhere from 189 to 195. TV Chile’s Facebook page says 212. Many lists begin with the 192 United Nations members and may add a few such as Kosovo or Taiwan, not recognized by the UN. Another imaginative effort counted Internet domain names, such .de for Germany and came up with 243 and goes on to say that there’s no accepted number but between 193 and 250 is “rather certain!” When it comes to regions, infoplease.com gives 47 countries in Africa plus six islands off the coast for a presumed total of 53 but answerbag.com says 58, which is actually one more than PRB lists.
There is, of course, no single answer and much lies in one’s definition of a country. Loosely speaking, a country is an independent, sovereign state that has delegated none of it powers to another country. For its annual World Population Data Sheet, PRB does not use the term “country” but “geopolitical entity” — a neat way to avoid commitment! In the spreadsheet upon which the Data Sheet is based (which went from being handwritten on green accounting worksheets until the early 1980s to Lotus 1-2-3 and then on to Excel), there 240 countries and that number is about to rise.
Years ago, PRB based its list largely on the UN Demographic Yearbook, which is similar to the breakdown of countries and regions in the biennial world population projections of the UN Population Division. A country defined this way is actually to linked to whether or nor its population is shown separately. For example, the figures used for “France” in the Data Sheet and by the UN refer to métropolitaine France, which consists of the départements on the mainland plus Corsica. Guadeloupe, Guyana, Martinique, and Reunion are overseas departments and their populations are traditionally shown separately. Puerto Rico is similar in that it is a commonwealth with the United States and its population is individually listed, not lumped together with the United States. Its official name in Spanish translates as “Free Associated State,” which seems a bit stronger than commonwealth.
The Final Jeopardy category was U.S. Cities. The clue: "Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero, its second largest for a World War II battle." Watson, strangely, came up with the response: "What is Toronto??????" It was programmed to add all those question marks to show the audience that it had very low confidence in the response. But still, how could it choose Toronto in a category for U.S. cities.
After the game, Ferrucci and his team were eager to explain Watson's thinking process. Strangely, from a PR point of view, they seemed determined to focus on one moment of weakness in session that exhibited Watson's strengths. But they have poured four years of research into this machine, and they like to clear up doubts.
A few key issues:
1) Watson can never be sure of anything. Is it possible that the old rock star Alice Cooper is a man? If Watson finds enough evidence, it will bet on it--even though the name "Alice" is sure to create a lot of doubt. This flexibility in its thinking can save Watson from gaffes--but also lead to a few.
2) Category titles cannot be trusted. I blogged about this earlier, in a post How Watson Thinks. It has learned through exhaustive statistical analysis that many clues do not jibe with categories. A category about US novelists, for example, can ask about J.D. Salinger's masterpiece. Catcher in the Rye is a novel, not a novelist! These things happen time and again, and Watson notices. So it pays scant attention to the categories.
3) If this had been a normal Jeopardy clue, Watson would not have buzzed. It had only 14% confidence in Toronto (whose Pearson airport is named for a man who was active in World War two One), and 11% in Chicago. Watson simply did not come up with the answer, and Toronto was its guess.
Even so, how could it guess that Toronto was an American city? Here we come to the weakness of statistical analysis. While searching through data, it notices that the United States is often called America. Toronto is a North American city. Its baseball team, the Blue Jays, plays in the American League. (That's why Ferrucci was wearing a Blue Jay jacket). If Watson happened to study the itinerary of my The Numerati book tour, it included a host of American cities, from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, to Seattle, San Francisco, and Toronto. In documents like that, people often don't stop to note for inquiring computers that Toronto actually shouldn't be placed in the group.
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