What Happens Inside an Earthquake?
Experts can explain exactly where a quake started and what type of fault is involved and maybe even predict how long aftershocks will last. But they are quite unsure of what happens inside the planet during a quake. The nature and behavior of the forces that keep faults from moving and then suddenly fail are still unknown.
"The problem of frictional sliding in earthquakes is one of the most fundamental problems in all of Earth science," said Caltech geophysicist Tom Heaton.
"It has been a 30-year mystery story of figuring out the basic physics of the
earthquake problem."
Who Are You?
The nature of consciousness has long baffled psychologists and cognitive scientists. Part of the answer, however, is surprisingly simple: Most of what drives what we do is embedded in neural networks not readily accessible by conscious thought, said Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University.
"The intuitive everyday idea about the sense of self and its control over
behavior is as incorrect as the idea that the earth is flat," Morsella agreed.
Although we think of ourselves as independent agents, we're not. Everything
we do is influenced by unconscious processes and our environment, he added.
How Did Life Arise on Earth?
Early evidence for simple, microbial life on Earth dates back more than 3 billion years. How it arose, nobody knows. Ideas range from chemical reactions around seafloor heat vents to reactions in rock.
"Many theories of the origin of life have been proposed, but since it's hard to prove or disprove them, no fully accepted theory exists," said Diana Northup,a cave biologist at the University of New Mexico.
How Does the Brain Work?
With billions of neurons, each with thousands of connections,
this is a tough nut to crack.
"We all think we understand the brain--at least our own--through our experiences.But our own subjective experience is a very poor guide to how the brain works,"said Scott Huettel of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University.Among the enigmas: "We do not yet have a good way to study how groups of neurons form functional networks when we learn, remember, or do anything else, including seeing, hearing moving, loving," said said Norman Weinberger,
a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine. "If we understand the brain, we will understand both its capacities and its limits for thought, emotions, reasoning, love and every other aspect of human life."
Where is the Rest of the Universe?
It stinks when try to study something and most of it isn't there. So it is with the universe.
"I call it the dark side of the universe," said Michael Turner, a cosmologist at
the University of Chicago, referring to the great mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.
In fact, only 4 percent of the matter and energy in the universe has been found.
The other 96 percent remains elusive, but scientists are looking in the
farthest reaches of space and deepest depths of Earth to solve the two dark riddles.
What Causes Gravity?
You'd think this down-to-earth concept would be well understood. Heck, Newton
figured it out long ago, right?Nope. Gravity is the weakest of all known forces in the universe, and the standard mode of physics does not explain how it works. Theorists think it
might involve tiny, massless particles called gravitons that emanate gravitational fields.
"Gravity is completely different from the other forces described by the standardmodel," said Mark Jackson, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab in Illinois. "When you do some calculations about small gravitational interactions, you get stupid answers. The math simply doesn't work.
Does Alien Life Exist?
Life is everywhere. At least on this planet. So it's logical to assume itmight be everywhere in the universe, too. But so far we've only thoroughlyexamined one world, so the sample size is a bit small.We know now that the ingredients for life are widely distributed. And we know there are solar systems strikingly like ours our there. "We are here, made of stardust. Therefore, it is at least possible that there are others," said Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research in California. And there ought to be some smart life out there, too. "Mankind has achieved
scientific-technological civilization only in the last 200 years or so, out of about 4.5 billion years of life on Earth," said Frank Wilczek, a Nobel-Prize winning physicist at MIT. "So it seems we ought to expect there to be many scientific-technological civilizations that have had many millions, or even billions, of years to develop."
How Did the Universe Begin?
Yes, theory holds that it all started with the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, with everything starting in a space smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. In the blink of an eye, it all grew to cosmic scales in by a process called inflation. Problem is, while this predicts a lot of what's seen today, it can't be directly tested.
"Inflation is an extremely powerful theory, and yet we still have no idea what
caused inflation--or whether it is even the correct theory, although it works
extremely well," said Eric Agol, an astrophysicist at the University of Washington.










































