Superfast Spinning Black Hole Tearing Up Space at Nearly the Speed of Light

Artist's illustration of matter falling into a black hole, with X-rays blasting out from the very center. Click to chandrasekharenate.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Black holes are the Universe’s ultimate garbage disposals: Stuff falls in, and never gets back out. It can’t. To get out, you’d have to travel faster than the speed of light, which (as far as we know) is impossible.

Black holes grow by consuming matter, and in the centers of galaxies they can grow to huge size. In the gorgeous barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 (shown below), there’s one lurking in the core that has about two million times as much mass as our Sun. Not only that, it is actively gobbling down matter, and that allows us to measure some interesting properties of this cosmic monster, including its spin. Astronomers observed NGC 1365’s black hole using the NuSTAR and XMM-Newton observatories, and were surprised to find out it’s spinning so fast that the outer edge is moving at very nearly the speed of light!

This takes some explaining. Hang on tightly, and for your own safety please keep your arms inside the blog post at all times.

Black holes are confusing, but the bottom line is that they are such highly-concentrated massive objects that their escape velocity is faster than light—I wrote a somewhat more lengthier explanation on the old blog here and here if you want more details. Once something falls in, it cannot get out, but some of the properties of that material remain: specifically mass, spin, and charge. That last bit is literally electrical charge, like how an electron has a negative charge. Physically it’s very interesting, but in practical terms it hardly comes up, so we can ignore it here.

Mass is the critical one, because the more mass a black hole has, the bigger it gets and the stronger its gravity is as well. But spin is important too. Look at, for example, a black hole forming via the collapse of a star’s core when the outer layers explode in a supernova. The core is spinning since the star rotates. As the core collapses, that spin rate increases, in much the same way a skater can increase his or her spin by bringing their arms in close to their body. This is called conservation of angular momentum; objects spinning tend to stay spinning due to momentum, just like any object in motion tends to stay in motion due to momentum. The total angular momentum depends on the object’s size and rate of spin. Increase one and the other must decrease; if you make something smaller it’ll spin faster.

So by the time the core of our doomed star collapses all the way down to a back hole, the spin can be ferociously large.

But there’s more. If there is material around the black hole falling in it can change the spin as well. If material fell straight into the black hole, the spin wouldn’t change much (if anything it would decrease, because the added mass makes the black hole bigger, so, like the skater throwing out his/her arms, the spin slows). But if that material comes in at a slight angle, it can actually add to the spin of the black hole, increasing its angular momentum. That gives a kick to the spin rate, bumping it up.

The massive spiral galaxy NGC 1365 has a huge black hole in its heart, spinning at nearly the speed of light. Click to galactinate.

Image credit: ESO/P. Grosbøl

And that brings us back to NGC 1365, located about 60 million light years from Earth. Astronomers used NuSTAR to look at X-rays pouring out of material falling into the black hole there. As that material falls in it heats up to millions of degrees, blasting out X-rays that are easily bright enough to see from Earth with the right equipment. Careful observations allowed astronomers to see these X-rays coming from matter just before it reached The Point Of No Return, at a position called the Innermost Stable Circular Orbit, or ISCO. If it gets any closer, blooop! It falls in, and it’s gone.

As the material swirls around the black hole, it emits X-rays at a very specific energy—think of it as a color. But as it orbits that color gets smeared out due to the Doppler effect. The amount of smearing indicates how fast the material is moving, and that in turn can tell astronomers how fast the black hole is spinning. This can be complicated by the presence of dense clouds of material farther out from the black hole that absorb X-rays and mess up our observations. The new data from NuSTAR allowed astronomers to show that the smearing seen is definitely due to rotation and not obscuration, unambiguously revealing the black hole's tremendous spin: just a hair below the speed of light!

Most black holes spin far slower than that, so something ramped this hole’s spin way up. One possibility, as I mentioned above, is material falling in over time. Another is that it ate one or more other black holes, which is creepy but possible. Galaxies collide, and when they do their central black holes can merge, growing larger. If the geometry is just right, this can create a single black hole with more spin. Due this a few times, and you can spin one up to fantastic speeds.

I’ll note that NGC 1365 is a massive galaxy, easily twice as large as the Milky Way (an we’re one of the biggest galaxies in the Universe). That’s exactly what you’d expect from a galaxy that’s spent a lifetime eating other ones. Cosmic cannibals grow fat when the hunting’s good.

This is a pretty amazing finding by the NuSTAR astronomers. It shows that extremely detailed X-rays observations are possible; something that’s very difficult and painstaking to do. It also demonstrates that we can take a pretty close look at black holes and tease out details that were previously not possible to see. This in turn means we can test a lot of the hypotheses we have about these monsters and improve our understanding of them.

By themselves, black holes are invisible, dark, and nearly impossible to observe. But they’re sloppy eaters, and this betrays many of their secrets. Even from 600 million trillionkilometers away.

The Most Truthful iPad Ad Ever

CONAN Highlight: Finally, Apple comes clean about how most people use their tablets.

Scientifically Accurate Spider-Man

Why don’t Apple laptops have touch screens?

No touching.

Photo by Kimberly White/Reuters

Like many kids, my 2-year-old son can run circles around you on an iPad. He learned to unlock the screen before he learned to conjugate verbs, and nowadays he can turn it on, find Netflix or a game, and keep himself occupied forever, or at least for a merciful 40 minutes. (Email me here to tell me what a terrible parent I am.)

Computers, though, flummox him. He’s especially confused by pointing devices—I’ve tried to teach him about the relationship between his fingers on the track pad and the pointer on the screen, but he’s too innocent of the ways of the world to understand such mysticism. So when I plop him down in front of YouTube on my MacBook while my wife and I try to enjoy a lovely dinner—see that email address above—he always gets confused when a video ends. He reaches for the screen and repeatedly taps to get a new clip to play. It’s pretty funny, actually. And then he whines for me to help him, which is kind of annoying.

But of course, my kid is totally right. Why doesn’t the MacBook screen respond to his touch? In the couple of years since my son was born, nearly every screen that we interact with has become touch-enabled. Your phone, tablet, Kindle, GPS, car radio, and maybeeven your fridge—you can tap that. But not your computer. Or, more specifically, not yourMac.

Last fall Microsoft released Windows 8, which brings touch capabilities to the ubiquitous PC operating system. This year PC makers are putting out dozens of touch-enabled Windows 8 laptops and desktops. Or consider Google’s new Chromebook Pixel, which has a brilliant high-definition display screen that responds to touch. At $1,299, the Pixel is a high-end machine, but what’s most interesting about touch screens is that they’re quickly becoming a standard feature even on low- and mid-range machines. The Asus VivoBook, an 11-inch touch-screen laptop, sells for under $500. The HP Pavilion TouchSmart goes for $649.* When you get to machines classified as “ultrabooks”—the thin and light PCs that are meant to compete with Apple’s MacBook Air—it’s hard to find any that don’t have touch screens. The Acer Aspire S7, the Asus Zenbook Prime Touch, and the Samsung Series 7 Chronos—which go for around $1,100—can all be touched. You’ll spend around the same for a Mac, but if you touch its screen, all you’ll get are smudges.

I should note that the new touch PCs don’t dispense with track pads or mice; you’ll spend most of your time controlling them through those traditional means. But they also allow you to touch—if my son tapped a YouTube clip on the Pixel’s screen, the video would start playing, and I’d be able to continue eating dinner in peace.

The rise of touch-enabled computers raises two questions. First, what’s the point: Do you really need to be able to touch your computer’s screen rather than use a track pad or mouse? And second, why is Apple—the firm that has done more to stoke our collective touch-screen fervor than any other—apparently holding out against touch on its computers?

To answer the first question: Yes, a touch screen on a PC can be useful. Over the past few months I’ve used a few touch-enabled Windows 8 PCs, and during the last week I’ve been playing with a Chromebook Pixel that Google sent me to review. I’ve found their touch screens to be handy—the screen complements the keyboard and the track pad quite naturally, making for one more way to get your computer to do your bidding. I wouldn’t go so far as to say you need a touch screen on your PC. Touching the screen doesn’t allow you to do anything you couldn’t do on a nontouch PC. But like other high-end laptop features—a backlit keyboard, a slot for an SD card, a high-definition display—a touch screen is a nice thing to have.

I found myself touching the screen during a few primary tasks. If I pulled up a long article on the Web and sat back to read, I’d sometimes reach for the screen to scroll down rather than hit the keyboard or flick at the track pad. I did the same when I was flipping through photos. Windows 8 has two completely different interfaces—a traditional “desktop” mode in which you click on small icons to launch programs that run in multiple windows on your screen (i.e., the Windows we all know and love), and a “modern” mode in which apps occupy the full screen and feature large, touch-friendly buttons. When I used this second mode, I found myself touching more often—to browse Amazon or Netflix, to read the news, or to play games.

You may have spotted a pattern there: I tended to touch for leisure activities, and I’d stick to the keyboard and track pad when doing work. But this wasn’t by design, and I only discerned the leisure-vs.-work behavior when I thought about it later. Indeed, while using these touch laptops, the touching became intuitive and invisible. I flitted among the screen, the track pad, and the keyboard from moment to moment without ever having to think about it.

I didn’t expect to take to touching my PC. The conventional criticism against adding touch to laptops is that it’s unnatural. When you use a laptop, your hands usually rest on the keyboard, which is relatively far from the screen; from that position it’s easier to reach for the track pad than the display. The other problem is what’s on the screen. On a PC—even a Windows 8 machine with an interface specifically designed for touch—there are lots of small controls that are better handled with a precise pointer than your fat finger. For instance, to close a tab in the Chrome browser, you’ve got to hit a little X next to the tab’s title. I’d often miss that X when I tried to hit it with my finger. That was a bit frustrating—although after a few times making that mistake, I learned to stop trying to close tabs with my finger, and then I didn’t get annoyed anymore.

This gets to why Apple hasn’t added touch to the Mac. While it’s mostly handy, sometimes touching your PC’s screen results in an annoying experience. And it’s just not Apple’s way to build a new feature that’s sometimes annoying (well, OK, other than in iTunes, Maps, Siri … ). Thus, to do it right, giving a MacBook a touch screen wouldn’t just require a small hardware upgrade to the screen—Apple would also have to reimagine its OS, redesigning it so that every element could be controlled as easily with your fingers as with a pointer. Microsoft solved this problem by building a touch-friendly interface that sits alongside the old Windows’ point-and-click interface, but I don’t think Apple would go for that—it feels too tacked-on and inelegant. Apple would have to do something bigger and more ambitious than that. But why should it? Considering that the Mac is an ever-smaller part of its revenues, and that Apple firmly believes that PCs will be eclipsed by tablets anyway, it has little incentive to make the Mac touch-friendly. Thus, for the foreseeable future, we’re likely to be stuck with touch-less Macs. (Indeed, CEO Tim Cook came close to ruling them out in a conference call with investors last year.)

And that’s too bad. Last month I spoke to Tami Reller, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer for the Windows division, and Aidan Marcuss, a principal director for Windows Research, at the company’s San Francisco office. On their trip from Redmond, Wash., Reller and Marcuss had brought along several touch-enabled Windows 8 laptops, which they described as being the future of computing.

“For consumers—for mainstream laptops—they’ll be increasingly all be touch,” Reller told me. This wasn’t an idle prediction. Reller’s position was bolstered by data. Throughout the development of Windows 8, Microsoft has been tracking anonymous usage data from people’s computers. It has now collected more than 1.2 billion hours of data—more than 700 centuries—about how people use Windows 8. And the data is definitive: It shows that when people are given PCs with touch screens, they use them.

“We see it very clearly in the data,” Marcuss said. “People with touch laptops touch the screen. They reach out, they touch it, and over time they touch it more. They intersperse typing and touching quite a bit. It makes them more efficient in many of the things they want to do—for instance, in the very simple use case of flipping through a PowerPoint presentation. The data supports it. People do it.”

Soon, you too will be reaching out and touching your laptop—unless it’s a Mac.

Harry Styles hit by flying shoe at 1D gig

Harry Styles fell to the floor in pain live on stage last night after being hit below the belt by a shoe thrown by a fan.

On stage in Glasgow, Styles was hit in the crotch with a show thrown at him by a fan, and fell to the floor as Liam Payne and Zayn Malik rushed to his aid.

Styles recovered and carried on the performance, doing a few lunges on stage to make sure everything was ok.

The boys have been touring since January and will remain in the UK until April before heading to Europe, Mexico and America, where fans will hopefully shower the boys in less dangerous gifts.

The incident was caught on camera, watch it below.

1D's Louis "Very Sad" Over Comic Relief Single Leak

One Direction star Louis Tomlinson has expressed his sadness after the boyband's Comic Relief single leaked online ahead of its official premiere.

A low-quality version of their cover of the Blondie hit One Way Or Another has emerged on the internet ahead of its release on February 17 - leaving Tomlinson to take to Twitter to urge fans to pre-order the song instead.

The 21-year old tweeted: "I hear the charity single has been leaked. Very sad to see. Don't forget together we are trying to raise money for comic relief."

He added: "Please get behind an incredible charity and make a real difference. You can pre order now from iTunes for the official track. Thank you."

1D are set to perform the song - which also samples Teenage Kicks by The Undertones - for the first time at The Brit Awards on February 20.

The most shocking photo of Beijing air pollution I’ve ever seen

At left, a view of downtown Beijing on a clear day. At right, the same view on Wednesday night, U.S. east coast time. Click to enlarge. (Photos by Bill Bishop)

China’s air pollution has been bad lately. Really, really bad. We’ve posted photos of it before, but the above shot really drives home how severe this has gotten.

Both photos were taken in Beijing by Bill Bishop, who runs an excellent all-things-China e-mail newsletter called Sinocism (go subscribe). The photo on the left shows his view on a clear day. That tall building is the mammoth China World Trade Center Tower III.

On the right is a photo of the same view, taken late on Wednesday, U.S. East Coast time, or about 8 a.m. Beijing time. The 81-story skyscraper is all but invisible, shrouded by a layer of pollution so dense that even close-up objects are a blur.

Air pollution is gauged by a measurement called particles per cubic meter of air, sometimes abbreviated PM2.5 because it measures particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers wide. The higher the PM2.5 rating, the more dangerous particles are in the high, the worse the air is for your health.

To give you a sense of scale, there’s a big controversy in Utah right now because the PM2.5 air pollution in Salt Lake City has sometimes hit as high as 69. That number is considered unhealthy. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, even adults should avoid all outdoor activities if the count hits 300. In Beijing and other Chinese cities, the air pollution rating can spend days hovering around 500.

The pollution has been largely sustained for several weeks now, getting so bad that even Chinese state media is starting to call for the country’s leadership to reconsider its at-all-costs emphasis on economic growth.

Here’s a larger version of the photo, not that you can make much out in it:

Beijing on the morning of Feb. 28, local time. (Photo by Bill Bishop)

This Comedian Just Blew Up Italian Politics

Profile: Beppe Grillo

Beppe Grillo, seen here at a rally in Turin, says he has started a "war of generations"

Voice of protest for some, populist demagogue for others, comedian Beppe Grillo has become a serious political player after taking a quarter of the vote in Italy's election, with his anti-establishment Five Star Movement.

Once effectively banished from TV after sending up politicians, he has created a brand of politics all of his own, one that has propelled Five Star to third place in both houses of parliament.

Dissatisfaction with the traditional political class, both right and left, drives a party which has made the internet its medium of choice, and has sought out relative unknowns for its candidates.

At 64, the bushy-haired comic leading this new third force can still work a crowd in a piazza and inspires a wide following on social media, tickling the Italian funny bone with his jokes. He called former Prime Minister Mario Monti, for example, "Rigor Montis" for his deadly serious manner.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

All the cards are in his hands”

Roberto D'AlimontePolitics professor, LUISS

However, his ability to engage ultimately in the business of government in one of the eurozone's biggest economies is less clear.

For one thing, Italian TV anchors have been famously unable to grill Mr Grillo on his programme, as he shuns the television studios beloved of politicians like centre-right leader Silvio Berlusconi.

Time 'hero'

Born 21 July 1948 in the coastal city of Genoa, he trained as an accountant before taking up comedy. The divorcee and his current wife care for six children from their current and previous marriages between them.

By the late 1970s, he was a regular on public TV, appearing in variety shows.

Despite a road accident in 1980, when he was convicted of manslaughter over the deaths of three people, he was soon fronting his own shows.

His raw humour appears to have earned him enemies. According to a biography on his blog, he "fled" TV for the theatre in 1990.He became known for daring jokes about politicians such as Bettino Craxi, the Socialist prime minister eventually convicted of corruption.

As a touring act, he turned his attention to big issues like consumerism and the environment and in 2005 started his blog, one of the most popular in Italy.

Time magazine chose him as a "European Hero" that year, saying he used "over-the-top humour to probe the serious social issues that leaders don't want to touch".

In 2007 he organised "V-Day" - the V stands for a well-known Italian obscenity - when a petition demanding clean politics in Italy gathered 300,000 signatures in the space of a few hours.

'Lifestyle choice'

Two years later, the wealthy performer set up Five Star, which was soon polling well in local elections.

The party's logo promotes Mr Grillo's blog, making clear that it is very much the vehicle of the ageing comedian, who cannot stand for parliament himself because of his manslaughter conviction.

Continue reading the main story

Start Quote

Mr Grillo, the BBC's Alan Johnston reported in December 2012, does not seem to have a great deal of patience for dissenting voices within the movement.

The Five Star leader is often accused of being a populist, constantly criticising the status quo but having little in the way of detailed, viable proposals for a better way forward, our Rome correspondent noted.

This lack of clarity about the party's policies has alarmed leaders in the wider eurozone, wrote the BBC's Europe editor, Gavin Hewitt.

If anything, Five Star's leader sounded even more radical at news of his party's spectacular gains.

"We've started a war of generations," he said in an audio statement on his website, which taunted the leaders of the mainstream parties.

Continue reading the main story

"They are all losers, they've been there for 25 to 30 years and they've led this country to catastrophe."

Mr Grillo's followers are known as grillini or "little crickets" - his name means "cricket" in Italian - and their collective chirp can no longer be safely ignored by Italy's established parties.

"Grillo will play a decisive role," Roberto D'Alimonte, a politics professor at Rome's LUISS university, told AFP news agency.

"He has to decide whether to strike a limited agreement with the left or whether to go for fresh elections. All the cards are in his hands."

Electoral reform - he would like to halve the number of MPs and strip parties of public funding - is likely to top the list of his demands, but much is still vague.

Speaking before the election, the comedian described his party as a "lifestyle choice". "You have to participate actively in politics, change your habits: eat, travel, shop in a certain way," he was quoted as saying by AFP.

Many must now be wondering what that "certain way" represents.

Experiments on Cadavers Settle 100 Year-Old Puzzle Over Human Skin Strength

Langer lines map out the pattern of forces within the skin but nobody knew what caused them. Until now.

The mechanical properties of skin are important factors in everything from forensic science to razor blade design. And yet studies that have actually measured these properties are few and far between, most research in this area being done on synthetic or animal skin. 

Today, Aisling Nı Annaidh at University College Dublin in Ireland and a few pals right this wrong with a detailed analysis of the mechanical properties of 56 pieces of skin removed from dead humans. In the process, these guys have settled a debate about the nature of skin strength that has puzzled anatomists since the 19th century.

The first detailed study of skin strength was carried out in the 1860s by Karl Langer, an Austrian anatomist working in Vienna. He mapped the natural lines of tension within skin by puncturing the skin on a cadaver with a circular tool and then measuring the shape of the resulting hole.

The tension within the skin makes these holes elliptical in a direction parallel to the tension. Consequently, a simple measurement of the orientation of these ellipses allowed Langer to map out lines of force in the skin over the entire body. Today, these lines are known as Langer lines.

But Langer lines raise an important question. Are they simply the result of forces that arise when the skin is attached to the body or is there some anatomical reason for the pattern, some structure in the skin that causes the forces to align in this way? 

One line of thinking is that collagen fibres become aligned in certain directions and these therefore determine the direction of the Langer lines. But nobody has ever compared the structure of collagen fibres to the direction of Langer lines. 

Until now. Annaidh and co took 56 samples of skins from the backs of cadavers donated to medical science. They then measured the tensile strength of this skin and worked out the structure of collagen fibres within it using a collagen staining technique.

Finally, they compared the pattern of collagen fibres to the generally accepted map of Langer  lines.

Their conclusion is straightforward. “There is a definite correlation between the orientation of Langer Lines and the preferred orientation of collagen fibres,” say Annaidh and co.

That conclusion and the other mechanical properties that the team measured will be useful in various fields such as cosmetics, surgical simulation, forensic pathology and impact biomechanics.

And this not being the type of experiment that is done very often, the results will no doubt be used for decades to come.

Ref: http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.3022 :Characterising the Anisotropic Mechanical Properties of Excised Human Skin

15 Things You Didn't Know About “Bloodsport”

The real Frank Dux reveals details of the classic fight movie 25 years after Jean-Claude Van Damme took on the role.
 posted on February 27, 2013 at 12:42pm 

What Uncle Sam Charges Anne Hathaway for her $47K Oscar Goody Bag

An all-expenses paid trip to Australia, a gift certificate for a facelift, and oh yea, a bottle of Windex. These are just some of the items celebrities received on the film industry’s biggest night of the year, and Uncle Sam will get his piece.

Despite the 2013 official Oscar gift bag being worth a reported $47,000 this year, celebrity lifestyle expert Dorothy Cascerceri says that number is tame compared to the value of swag filling the bags in the past.

“In years past, the gift bags have totaled up to $90,000. I think everyone is scaling back because of the economy. But frankly, do you think a celebrity will miss that? Definitely not.”

The facelift gift certificate is worth $5,000, she says, and the trip to Australia rings in at $30,000, making up for the bulk of the gift bag’s price. In addition to the Windex, which Cascerceri says is an odd inclusion, celebs also received hair ties that double as bracelets and Leeza Gibbons’ book, Take 2: Your Guide to Creating Happy Endings and New Beginnings

“There have been trips [like the Australia package] in the past,” she says. “Celebrities don’t fly coach, so it’s a big-ticket item.”

But don’t expect to catch Jennifer Lawrence and George Clooney on a plane to down under filling the time reading the self-help book. Cascerceri says most celebrities re-gift the goodies.

“Most celebrities have enough money to go to Australia, so they gift them to the people around them, like their hair and makeup people.”

But all that swag comes with a price to Uncle Sam; Cascerceri likens it to winning a prize on Jeopardy.

“It’s like winning a car on a game show,” she says. “You are able to drive the car away, but it’s not for free.”

The gift bags get taxed at the total cost of the full package, according to Certified Public Accountant Dan Roman of Liberty Tax in Detroit. So the full $47,000 will be taxed at both the state level of 13.3% in California, where it was issued, as well as at the federal rate of 39.1%, assuming the recipients are in the top income tax bracket.

“The IRS indicates these things as payment for something when celebrities receive these gifts,” Roman says.

The  tricky part of the scenario is in gifting the goodies to someone else. In this case, celebrities are supposed to issue the IRS and the person they are giving it to a 1099, so the government can track it. The celebrity will get taxed on it and it can be seen as a gift or additional income for the secondary recipient, according to Roman.

And finally if the A-lister is feeling charitable, and donates the Oscar goody bag, they can claim the charitable deduction and pay zero taxes on the gifts inside, he says.

Follow Kate Rogers on Twitter at @KateRogersNews

Sh*t People Say To Female Journalists

'ARE YOU LOST, LITTLE GIRL?'

Sh*t People Say To Female Journalists->

IT’S THE ECONOMY

Are We in Danger of a Beer Monopoly?

Illustration by Jasper Rietman

Every day, the Web site BeerPulse tries to list every single new beer available in the United States. And that’s harder than you might imagine. Recently, the site posted Cigar City’s Jamonera Belgian-style Porter, Odell Tree Shaker Imperial Peach IPA, as well as a rye lager, a cherry blossom lager and a barley wine. And the list goes on, and on. In 1978, there were 89 breweries in the United States; at the beginning of this year, there were 2,336, with an average of one new brewery per day. Most of them are tiny, but a handful, like Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada, have become large national brands. At the same time, sales of Budweiser in the United States have dropped for 25 consecutive years.

Deep thoughts this week:

1. Economists use game theory to predict which mergers are good for consumers.

2. Expect many more of them in the near future.

3. One day soon, the Justice Department might be the least of megacompanies’ worries.

It’s the Economy

Adam Davidson translates often confusing and sometimes terrifying economic and financial news.

So I was surprised to learn that the Justice Department is worried that Anheuser-Busch InBev, the conglomerate that owns Bud, is on the cusp of becoming an abusive monopoly. In January, the department sued AB InBev to prevent it from buying the rest of Mexico’s Grupo Modelo, a company in which it already carries a 50 percent stake. The case is not built on any leaked documents about some secret plan to abuse market power and raise prices. Instead, it’s based on the work of Justice Department economists who, using game theory and complex forecasting models, are able to predict what an even bigger AB InBev will do. Their analysis suggests that the firm, regardless of who is running it, will inevitably break the law.

For decades, they argue, Anheuser-Busch has been employing what game theorists call a “trigger strategy,” something like the beer equivalent of the Mutually Assured Destruction Doctrine. Anheuser-Busch signals to its competitors that if they lower their prices, it will start a vicious retail war. In 1988, Miller and Coors lowered prices on their flagship beers, which led Anheuser-Busch to slash the price of Bud and its other brands in key markets. At the time, August Busch III told Fortune, “We don’t want to start a blood bath, but whatever the competition wants to do, we’ll do.” Miller and Coors promptly abandoned their price cutting.

The trigger strategy, conducted in public, is entirely legal. In fact, it’s how airlines, mobile- phone companies and countless other industries keep their prices inflated. Since that dust-up in the late ’80s, the huge American beer makers have moved in tandem to keep prices well above what classical economics would predict. (According to the logic of supply and demand, competing beer makers should pursue market share by lowering prices to just above the cost of production, or a few cents per bottle.) Budweiser’s trigger strategy has been thwarted, though, by what game theorists call a “rogue player.” When Bud and Coors raise their prices, Grupo Modelo’s Corona does not. (As an imported beer, Corona is also considered to have a higher value.) And so, according to the Justice Department, AB InBev wants to buy Grupo Modelo not because it thinks the company makes great beer, or because it covets Corona’s 7 percent U.S. market share, but because owning Corona would allow AB InBev to raise prices across all of its brands. And if the company could raise prices by, say, 3 percent, it would earn around $1 billion more in profit every year. Imagine the possibilities. The Justice Department already has.

Representatives from AB InBev, however, have stated that the potential Corona acquisition is less about dominating the dwindling (albeit still $90 billion per year) U.S. beer market and more about a larger, global strategy. In that regard, AB InBev has been on quite a roll. The Brazilian firm Companhia de Bebidas das Américas, or AmBev, was born in 1999 around the concept of using innovative technology and managerial efficiency to disrupt the competition and channel the profits into buying them out. The company swallowed up several Latin American firms; in 2004, it merged with the Belgian giant Interbrew; in 2008, the new conglomerate, InBev, took over Anheuser-Busch. Along the way, it also picked up China’s third-largest brewer and the Canadian beer company Labatt.

We are still in the very early stages of what appears to be a global version of the scale-based consolidation we’ve seen in the United States over the past century. Before Prohibition, beer was largely a regional business, with thousands of small breweries serving markets often defined by city blocks. Until fairly recently, retail, food manufacturing, banking and countless other industries were also largely the domain of local or regional firms. And while in recent decades companies have scrambled to command international markets, the global fights have largely been over dominance of the United States, Western Europe and Japan.

But the goal of the Grupo Modelo merger, the company has stated, is to gear up for the big beer fight of the 21st century. As the traditional beer markets of the United States, Europe and Japan age, the most lucrative markets will be in China, India, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the wealthier countries of Africa and other places where, every single day, millions of young consumers will buy their first legal beer. On this front, AB InBev is already facing staunch competition from Denmark’s Carlsberg, Britain’s SABMiller and Japan’s Asahi. It’s not exactly worried about Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada.

These firms are among the many preparing for a global market several times larger than any that has ever existed. This helps explain why we have seen so many mergers in the past few months. The Justice Department recently approved the marriage of Penguin and Random House, and is expected to do the same with American Airlines and US Airways. Office Depot and OfficeMax are planning a merger of their own. These megamergers, however, do not inevitably create destructive monopolies. Carl Shapiro, the former chief economist at the Justice Department, told me that large mergers improve competition. Together, Penguin and Random House may be able to better stave off Amazon; American Airlines and US Airways can contend with Delta. Similarly, Office Depot and OfficeMax, once merged, may finally be large enough to really scare Staples. Fear, Shapiro says, is the key. Markets work best, he says, when “everyone has to watch their back.”

Shapiro admits that the Justice Department has lagged behind the work of many economists, and has been complicit in our fear of large mergers.(In some key decisions, like the 1962 Supreme Court ruling to block the merger of Brown Shoe and the Kinney Company, courts hurt consumers by preventing corporate efficiency.) But economic forecasting has improved since then, Shapiro says, and become more flexible. After AB InBev executives tweaked their Grupo Modelo acquisition plans, so not to affect their domestic interests, the Justice Department started to rerun the numbers. They’ll issue an opinion soon.

Over the coming decades, though, the opinion of American government officials might not matter quite so much. China’s National People’s Congress approved its first antimonopoly law in 2008, which, many economists fear, could be used to block foreign competitors and to promote local giants. India’s version, which went into effect in 2009, is even less clear. It’s quite possible that the true monopolistic battles of the 21st century will not be among massive corporations but among the self-interested governments. We can only hope that they don’t engage in a trigger strategy of their own.

Adam Davidson is co-founder of NPR’s “Planet Money,” a podcast and blog.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 3, 2013, on page MM16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: BUZZKILLED?.

Death on the Mississippi

The following is an article from Uncle John's Unstoppable Bathroom Reader.

Few people know about the Sultana, despite the fact that it suffered the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history. For some reason, it is almost completely ignored by history books. Here's the tragic story.

 HEADING HOME

The Civil War was finally over. It was April 1865, General Robert E. Lee had surrendered; Abraham Lincoln had been shot; and Confederate president Jefferson Davis had been captured. After four years of bloodshed, the war-torn nation was ready to start the process of healing and rebuilding. The first order of business was to get the weary troops home.

Captured Union soldiers were being released from Confederate prison camps. Thousands amassed along the Mississippi River seeking passage on one of the many steamships making their way upriver to the north.

One such riverboat was the Sultana, a state-of-the-art side-wheeler that had been built for transporting cotton. But now her cargo was people. By law, she was allowed to carry 376 passengers and a crew of 85, and the ship's captain and owner, J.C. Mason, had a reputation as a careful river pilot. But in the end, the money he stood to make from the Union government for transporting extra troops was too tempting to pass up: $5 for each enlisted man and $10 per officer.
A SETUP FOR DISASTER

The Sultana left New Orleans on April 21 carrying a small number of passengers, about 100, and headed north. Each time she stopped, though, the ship took on more troops. The men who boarded were weak, tired, and homesick. After spending months or even years in brutal prison camps, the only thing they wanted to do was get back to their families.

On April 24, the Sultana made her regular stop in Vicksburg, Mississippi, to take on more passengers. Captain Mason docked the ship to find thousands of soldiers waiting there. Under normal circumstances, the ship would have made a brief stop, allowing the prescribed number of passengers to board, and then departed. But one of the ship's main steam boilers had sprung a leak and needed to be repaired. 

First of all, Captain Mason made the decision to have a piece of metal welded over the leak to reinforce it (which took less than a day) instead of having the boiler replaced (which would have taken three days). While the boiler was being prepared, the waiting soldiers did everything they could to muscle their way onto the ship. Bribes were paid, and more and more men packed on. When the repairs were completed, Mason was eager to get underway, so he broke another rule. He let all of the passengers get on board before their names were logged in. Result: the ship was overloaded and no one on shore had a complete or accurate copy of the passenger list.

When an Army officer raised his concerns, Mason assured him that the Sultana was a competent vessel that could more than carry the load. "Take good care of those men, " the officer told him. "They are deserving of it."

THE MIGHTY MISS

Four years of war had been hard on the series of levees and dikes that control the flow of the Mississippi River. The spring of 1865 saw heavy rains, which, combined with winter snowmelt, caused the river to rise to flood stage. By April it was several miles wide and the icy current was much stronger than usual.

But the Sultana was solid and Captain Mason an able river man. As the ship trudged slowly upriver, she made a few more scheduled stops, picking up even more men at each one. The huddled passengers filled every bit of space on the 260-foot-long vessel -the bottom hull, the lower decks, the cabins, the pilothouse, and the hurricane deck on top. Yet even though the soldiers were tired and packed in like sardines, their spirits were high. They sang songs, told war stories, and shared their plans for when they finally got home …unaware of the disaster to come.

On the cool night of April 26, 1865, the Sultana disembarked from Memphis around midnight, carrying an estimated 2,300 people -six times its capacity. There were only two lifeboats and 76 life preservers on board.

HELL AND HIGH WATER

At around 2AM, the overloaded Sultana had made it nine miles north of Memphis when her weakened boiler could take no more. It exploded. The other two boilers went in quick succession.


The tremendous blast split the ship in two. Burning hot coals shot out like bullets. The horrified passengers were jarred awake, some sent hurtling through the air into the icy water, others scalded by the tremendous blast of steam. Still others were trapped on the lower decks to either suffocate, burn, or drown. The men on the top decks had a choice -albeit a dismal one: stay and face the spreading flames or try to swim to shore, more than a mile away in either direction.

One survivor remembered, "The men who were afraid to take to the water could be seen clinging to the sides of the of the bow of the boat until they were singed off like flies." Other who had waited too long on the hurricane deck were crushed when the two large smokestacks collapsed on them. Others slid down into the hottest part of the fire when the burning deck gave away.

Shrieks and screams pierced the night, as did the crackling of flames and the booms of small explosions. But the loudest of all was the hissing sound as sections of the flaming steamboat sank into the water. Another survivor described it like this:

The whole heavens seemed to be lighted up by the conflagration. Hundreds of my comrades were fastened down by the timbers of the decks and had to burn while the water seemed to be one solid mass of human beings struggling with the waves.

What was left of the Sultana drifted downstream until finally banking on a small island in the middle of the Mississippi River. The ship's broken, burning body then slowly disappeared into the dark water.

DAWN OF THE DEAD

As first light rose on the river, the devastation was overwhelming. Hundreds upon hundreds of bodies were floating down the Mississippi. Dotted between the corpses were dazed survivors floating on makeshift rafts of driftwood and ship parts. Some sang marching songs to keep their spirits up. Others just floated silently among the carnage.

All the way to Memphis, men -alive and dead- were washing up on shore. Barges and other steamships were dispatched for search and rescue. At least 500 men were treated at Memphis hospitals; 200 of them died there. Because the passenger list went down with the ship, no one knows for sure how many lives were lost that night, but most estimates put the number around 1,700 -including captain Mason.

Sultana survivors at a reunion in 1920.

INTO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

So why is the Sultana disaster such an unknown part of U.S. history? Mostly because of timing. After the bloodiest war in U.S.history, the nation was largely desensitized to death. What was another 1,700 in the wake of hundreds of thousands of casualties? The newspapers were full of articles about the end of the war, a new presidency, and a nation rebuilding. On the day before the disaster, the last Confederate army had surrendered and John Wilkes Booth had been captured. The story of the sinking of the Sultana was relegated to the back pages.

Another reason for the minimal coverage was that it was an embarrassing story. A lot of people -from the ship's captain to the army officers in charge of boarding- had failed miserably at their jobs. The Army was not anxious to publicize such a horrible dereliction of duty.

But the fact remains that the explosion and sinking of the Sultana was -and still is- the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history. Her bow is still lying on the muddy bottom of the Mississippi River as a sad memorial to the men who never made it home.

___________________

The article above was reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Unstoppable Bathroom Reader.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!