I've been working on revising a story entitled Demon Deacon and the Ballerina Music Box. It brought this up on a search I made while taking a break.
THE Right Brain vs Left Brain test ... do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?
If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.
Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it.
- rick, procrastinating
This is pretty darned cool:
Imagine being able to put your entire DVD collection on a single disc. And not just your collection, but also that of your family, friends and neighbours … the contents, in fact, of as many as 200,000 DVDs.
It sounds a stretch of imagination, but this is the aim of Professor Min Gu and his team at Swinburne University of Technology’s Centre for Micro-Photonics.
They are three years into a five year project that is looking at how nanotechnology — particularly the use of nanoscopic particles — can be used to exponentially increase the amount of information contained on a single disc.
But the problem I see with it is that the more compressed the storage, the more things we store. As a people there will never be enough room. Think about it this way, when the only mass production of information was done by monks copying ancient texts in an abbey (to be fair, the texts may not have been ancient at the time they were doing the copying), vast libraries were created which housed all the shared knowledge of the world. Printing presses = more libraries. Recordable media, like phonograph records, and more libraries - this time for music and speech. Micro-fiche and we started also housing photographs, articles, scientific papers and books that way. CD's = more music, then files and conversations and photo albums and artwork.
Every innovation means that more of our world is stored and retrievable.
This discovery might mean that every second of every camera and microphone on earth will be permanently stored. Every moment of people's lives will be recorded for future playback.
When will it be enough?
When can our memories suffice, and grow and change and let us perceive what happened the way we'd like to remember it rather than the raw data of how it actually occurred?
rick, pessimistic.
This is cool.
Spewing out of Enceladus's south pole is a geyser, a fizzling spray of what looks like ice-crystals ejected from a big liquid reservoir. The presence of liquid water indicates a heat source (it's 330 degrees below zero on most of Enceladus's surface, so something must be heating the area), as well as the possibility that life exists in a form we might recognize.
Liquid water beneath the surface of Enceladus for hundreds of millions of years? That's plenty long enough to bring together the building blocks of life. This, in my opinion, is well worth exploration.
In August Cassini is set for another fly-by and we'll get more data about this discovery. I hope we know more soon, and that this is the first step in moving scientific exploration out of the hands of a theocratic administration worried more about keeping the biblical creation myth protected than discoveries the wonders of our universe.
- rick, space explorer.
He was the standard bearer for the space age. His scientific knowledge blended with his perfect prose to give us the rarest of writers: one whose fiction led fact.
Allow me a non-scientific metaphor. The greatest sheep dogs don't nip the sheep, they run ahead to show the herd where to go and then they push them along from behind.
Arthur C. Clarke was science's sheepdog, he showed them what was possible, then he herded them along until they got there. He dreamed the possible and combined it with an intimate knowledge of physics. This combination made him our modern version of a prophet. He forecasted telecommunication satellites and the geosynchronous orbit that allows them to relay signals to wide swaths of the earth. The International Astronomical Union named those 22,240 mile high equatorial orbits The Clarke Orbit.
What he was best known for was his writing. He was the master of the big idea and his novels reflected a hopeful promise of the realized virtue of mankind. He tried to show that we could transcend war, hunger and poverty if we just worked toward common goals like solar system exploration and universal prosperity. He caused you to think about that big idea, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, and sometimes for the rest of your life, such as with 2001: A Space Odyssey, Childhood's End, and Rendezvous with Rama. The big idea was his domain more than any other science fiction writer, it was his playground.
The theme that really stuck out for me was his fascination with a higher power. He explored God from all perspectives, even looking within his characters to find that the higher power resided within. When reading his work I sometimes find myself holding my breath as my imagination synchronized with Clarke's - it's that magic moment where you know that you just experienced through reading what the author experienced through creating. Pure, Magic.
One thing not many people know about me (until now, when I'm publishing this on the internet) is that I really like Mike Oldfield's 1970's music, like Songs from a Distant Earth and Tubular Bells. Oldfield named many parts of his work after Arthur C. Clarke stories and it's perfect mood music for reading Clarke's work.
I'm going to leave y'all with what I think is Clarke's best short story, The Nine Billion Names of God. It's available at that link. Read it if you haven't already. Let me know what you think in the comments.
- rick, fan
Apparently the government thinks we aren't smart enough to know when to wake up and when to go to bed. They think that we're under the impression that the sun is dependent on our timepieces. Of course with all the people who believe that the earth was created *poof* six thousand years ago, plus or minus a day or two, they might have a point.
Originally Daylight Savings time was supposed to save candle wax and allow farmers who live their lives by the pocket watch (instead of the sun and roosters) to get to the fields for maximum sunlight. It's supposed to conserve energy and we haven't abandoned the arcane practice for that very reason.
Now we find out that multiple studies say this is incorrect:
Last year the US switched to summer time, three weeks earlier than usual and added another week at the other end to cut fuel consumption and help the environment. The concept is that electricity demand falls in the evening because of the extra hour of usable daylight.
DST was signed into law with the Energy Policy Act and was expected to save US$4.4bn in energy bills over 15 years and avoid the need for three electric power plants. So someone has done their sums wrong - either the Government has unknowingly destroyed enough resources to feed a third world nation, or the new studies are wrong.
Just let the clocks run normally and give us a little credit for being able to look into the sky and figure out for ourselves whether the sun's up.
- rick, also smart enough to know if it's raining
Members of the Japan Origami Airplane Association believe they've come up with a paper airplane design that will float from the international space station all the way to the Earth . . . and not burn up on reentry.
The researchers are scheduled to begin testing the strength and heat resistance of an 8 centimeter (3.1 in) long prototype on January 17 in an ultra-high-speed wind tunnel at the University of Tokyo’s Okashiwa campus (Chiba prefecture). In the tests, the origami glider — which is shaped like the Space Shuttle and has been treated to withstand intense heat — will be subjected to wind speeds of Mach 7, or about 8,600 kilometers (5,300 miles) per hour.
I guess these guys always won those contests in cubicle city at work.
But this part confuses me.
“We hope the space station crew will write a message of peace on the plane before they launch it,” says Suzuki. “We don’t know where in the world the plane will land, but it would be nice to send a message to whoever finds it.”
Why don't they imbed a gps transmitter in it? They can track any kind of cell phone, why not a microchip on a paper airplane?
Guess that's why I'm not an Origami expert. Alan, got any ideas?
- rick, crumpling yet another design.
It's a race. John Pendry, a British theoretical physicist, proved that hiding from various waves was possible, and that sparked interest in invisibility. There have been designs for microwaves and visible light already. These are in 2-D, which makes them useful if you can control the direction which you want to view, or not be viewed as the case may be. I imagine that this technology is already being implemented on military aircraft because if you can be invisible from the ground, then you are completely invisible 99% of the time.
However, invisibility can be defined many ways and perhaps more important than light is sound. If one could make sound waves divert around a material - a metamaterial as has been hypothesized - then perfect soundproofing is possible and maybe complete shielding from earthquakes next.
Since this startling revelation a race has been initiation between various scientific teams.
The Chinese are working on "embedding rubber-coated gold spheres and water-filled pockets containing air bubbles in an epoxy resin."
A UK team "showed that carefully sculpted silica and a few carbon nanotubes could make acoustic metamaterials." The uses would be unlimited. Imagine a pair of headphones coated with this that would completely divert outside noise, leaving you actually experiencing music as if you are in the studio or in front of the stage at a concert. Imagine coating a submarine, making it invisible to sonar. Imagine a sea probe being invisible to all marine life, a perfect observer.
And now the Americans upped the ante. "They have worked out that it should be possible to make a 3D acoustic invisibility cloak - something that had still been in doubt."
Science is exciting.
- rick
400 Million Years ago the earth had a climate too harsh to support the biodiversity that exists today. This was during the Paleozoic era and sea levels were high, carbon dioxide was thick in the air, and temperatures were what we'd consider unbearable. During this time the most common plants and animals were plankton - single cell organisms. This plankton was instrumental in fueling all other life - as food for animals and through decay as food for plants. Slowly, over the course of millions of years, the plants absorbed the thick carbon dioxide and released enough oxygen which created conditions suitable for higher animal life forms.
This Plankton collected in large layers at the bottom of the seas. Covered, heated, pressurized - it became crude oil. Now we're burning it and releasing that carbon dioxide from 400 Million Years ago back into the atmosphere. We're recreating the conditions that aren't suitable to support us. Weird, huh?
Bex Huff pointed me to a project being conducted at the University of Minnesota to produce oil from Algae. Not only that, but the algae can live on waste water and consume pollution.
Algae, in comparison, produces 5,000 gallons of oil per acre. Not only that, but algae feeds off of waste streams! You can grow it on wastewater from a sewage treatment plant, or feed it air pollution from an industrial smokestack. It thrives in both conditions, and produces a remarkable amount of oil... you can then use this oil directly in a diesel engine, or refine it to make gasoline. I prefer the former...
Imagine that... recycling our garbage to make energy. It's the holy grail of closing-the-loop on recycling...
Now that's what I call a good idea.
- rick, hopeful
Sometimes you get what you pay for, and sometimes the best things in life are truly free. This one is free.
It's the Motion Mountain Physics Textbook, and it's free in pdf form. Better yet, the pdf is text searchable and referenced.
It's a work in progress, not yet finished, but over 1400 pages thus far:
The text is written for self-study. It tells a story; it is not a commented formula collection. In its teaching approach, the project tries to satisfy several needs. First of all, the explanations are written in a way that should appeal both to people who prefer thinking in images and to those that prefer thinking in words. Furthermore, the content has been selected to attract both male and female readers. Next, the text is written to appeal to composer and to competitor characters. The text also tries to cater both for the experimentally and the theoretically inclined. Finally, the story should appeal to those who like the natural sciences and to those who like the humanities.
An excerpt:
Astonishingly, it is actually impossible to distinguish an original picture of nature from its mirror image if it does not contain any human traces. In other words, everyday nature is somehow left-right symmetric. This observation is so common that all candidate exceptions, from the jaw movement of ruminating cows to the helical growth of plants, such as hops, or the spiral direction of snail shells, have been extensively studied. Can you name a few more? The left-right symmetry of nature appears because everyday nature is described by gravitation and, as we will see, by electromagnetism. Both interactions share an important property: substituting all coordinates in their equations by the negative of their values leaves the equations unchanged. This means that for any solution of these equations, i.e., for any naturally occurring system, a mirror image is a possibility that can also occur naturally. Everyday nature thus cannot distinguish between right and left. Indeed, there are right and left handers, people with their heart on the left and others with their heart on the right side, etc.
I think it looks brilliant. I've downloaded it and am asking Medium and Large to both put it on their computers as well. The perfect reference, with or without the internet.
Apologies if you wanted more writing exercises, but all of my fans overwhelmingly told me that the writing exercise segment sucks. And by all my fans, I mean Sugar. And by sucks, I mean she said to stop those posts.
Back to Science Friday.
In a joint project between researchers from the University of Michigan, Simon Fraser University in Canada and the University of Pittsburgh a knee brace that generates electricity has been developed.
I got this from Tim's Blog originally, but it got me thinking about the possibilities of residual energy. The way this particular device is supposed to work - and I say supposed to because there is only a prototype as yet - is that the point at which the knee is undergoing movement but when force is least applied a generator picks up the residual energy. It's movement we don't think about, but that can be harnessed.
Applications for this energy naturally gravitate toward powering personal electronics which seems reasonable. We all carry cell phones, laptops, iPods and whatnot. Other applications proposed include military personnel in the field, hikers, and people living in areas of the world without ready access to power.
What gets my mind spinning with possibility is the idea that there is a lot of residual energy around us that can be harnessed. Solar panels are being developed for backpacks and tents, wind generators are becoming smaller and more efficient, and now energy of motion can be harnessed. This points toward a trend of distributed small power centers.
Right now our power comes exclusively from giant power plants - coal, hydro, nuclear - and these are vulnerable at their source and through the distribution network of lines and substations. When we can generate power where we need it; at homes, on our persons, in our vehicles, the power network becomes invulnerable to natural disaster or attack.
Localized power generation is a true solution to energy independence. It's a real step forward in technology. It's better for the planet than a million bills by Congress against the oil, coal, and gas industries.
“A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?”
That one question has been debated across the internet, in airports, over drinks all across the country.
Well, I'm going to give you the answer early, in my own special way.
OF COURSE THE DAMNED PLANE TAKES OFF.
First let's look at it as a thought experiment:
When you run on a conveyor belt tuned to the same speed you're running, you won't move forward relative to the ground. When you drive a car on a hypothetical conveyor belt tuned to the same speed as the car, the car won't move forward relative to the ground.
What you're supposed to think is that the plane won't move forward relative to the ground if it's on the conveyor belt. But the plane has an important distinction compared to your feet and your car. Both you and your car propel yourself along because of the force you exert against the ground. The airplane exerts force, through propellers or jet engines against the air, the tires are not powered - not in any way. There is no motorization tied to wheels on any aircraft I've worked on or around. Those wheels spin freely and are there just to reduce friction against the ground. The skis on amphibious aircraft are proof of that. A plane can take off on a relatively calm river either upstream or downstream. What's more important is the direction of the wind, not the direction of the water.
Said another way: The plane doesn't care what's below it, so long as there's free airflow to create lift through the pressure differential on the two wing surfaces.
What's going to happen is that the conveyor and wheels will keep going faster and faster in free spin, until the plane leaves the ground, but that plane is going to be propelled down the conveyor runway by it's engines, not by its wheels.
Imagine this - we could witness an asteroid hitting Mars with the approximate force of a 3-Megaton bomb. The data alone could fuel studies on impact science for years to come. Not only that, but we could witness the event and send probes to examine the results and possibly get information on below-surface chemistry and geology. We could further examine the possibilities of life, water, and carbon. This is real science.
The odds are 1 in 75, so it's not likely to happen. But we can hope.
Here's the story:
A group of U.S. astronomers say there is a chance an asteroid could hit the planet Mars by the end of next month.
Stargazers in Arizona discovered a 50-meter wide asteroid in November that was designated "2007 WD5." Astronomers at the U.S. space agency NASA's Near-Earth Object Office are tracking the object and say it may pass within 48,000 kilometers of Mars by January 30.
The astronomers say there is a one-in-75 chance the asteroid will strike the planet on that day. The asteroid is compared to a similar object that struck Siberia in 1908 with the energy of a three-megaton bomb and destroyed tens of millions of trees.
NASA officials say if the asteroid does hit Mars, it will do so near the location of its Opportunity rover, which has been exploring the Martian surface for three years.
rick, geeking out
James Bond did it in Moonraker with Dr. Holly Goodhead. It was part of the sci-fi horror Supernova. But has zero-g space sex been tried by our astronauts? Or by Russia's Cosmonauts?
A new report by The Guardian reports that both NASA and Mission Control in Moscow have authorized "studies" into space sex.
Pierre Kohler, a respected French scientific writer, says in The Final Mission: Mir, The Human Adventure that the subject is taboo both at Nasa and at mission control in Moscow, but that cosmic couplings have taken place.
"The issue of sex in space is a serious one," he says. "The experiments carried out so far relate to missions planned for married couples on the future International Space Station, the successor to Mir. Scientists need to know how far sexual relations are possible without gravity."
So these sessions are so hush-hush that the agencies will not go on the record and confirm the reports or admit to the claim made in the article that the sessions were filmed . . . sounds like a natural for YouTube, doesn't it? What positions would succeed in a zero-G coupling, not missionary, it seems. No Fundamentalist Christians in space, thank you very much.
Twenty positions were tested by computer simulation to obtain the best 10, he says. "Two guinea pigs then tested them in real zero-gravity conditions. The results were videotaped but are considered so sensitive that even Nasa was only given a censored version."
Only four positions were found possible without "mechanical assistance". The other six needed a special elastic belt and inflatable tunnel, like an open-ended sleeping bag.
Mr Kohler says: "One of the principal findings was that the classic so-called missionary position, which is so easy on earth when gravity pushes one downwards, is simply not possible."
Now that's the best use of tax dollars since the invention of the Fischer Space Pen.
- rick, ready to join the 211 miles high club
This is cool.
This teenager was hunting around his family's ranch for dinosaur bones and guess what he found? A complete dinosaur mummy, that's what. Complete, including skin, scales and enough detail to determine that the hadrosaur was striped (although color has been lost in the fossilization). Since his discovery, Tyler Lyson, furthered his studies in paleontology and is now working on his doctorate degree in paleontology
at Yale University. He has also founded the Marmarth Research Foundation, an
organization dedicated to the excavation, preservation and study of
dinosaurs. Not a bad way to capitalize on a find and propel one's career. I don't know how it went down, but I can imagine a University bidding war for the rights to excavate and study the mummy, with scholarships and programs among the many offerings.
They named the mummified hadrosaur Dakota because it was found in a remote corner of North Dakota (oh, yes, I know that there are no corners that aren't remote in North Dakota). It's been x-rayed, CT scanned and studied in depth. It's going to be the topic of a National Geographic special this Sunday Night. Dino Autopsy. That's just cool.
Hat tip to Axial Tilt. John blogged about this before me.
Check it out a Sci-Fi Creature:
A 390 Million year old creature was discovered in a German Quarry. Well, it's claw was found, but extropolating out, this picture represents how big the scorpion would have been. This guy was a member of an extinct aquatic family, eurypterids. They are believed to be ancestors of modern land scorpions and possibly all arachnids. What this means is that scientists are going to have to revise their estimates of how large spiders, crabs, scorpions and other insects could have become.
All those b-movie sci fi creatures and horror double feature creatures might have basis beyond our own nightmares. Imagine the spider from The Lord of the Rings, Shelob, (and its derivatives in Harry Potter)
being a real possibility. Let's see some scientists try to recreate these bad boys like the Japanese are doing with the Mammoth.
I wonder how creationists explain away Adam and Eve living peaceably in the Garden with an eight-foot sea scorpion?
- rick, wondering
Okay, this is cool.
There's a solar system out there with 5 confirmed planets orbiting a sol-like star. Could this mean habitable planets? That's entirely possible, after all we're reasonably certain there's been life on Mars and we suspect life on Europa. Counting earth that's three locations just in our own solar system.
The Mormons believe that they'll all become Gods and Goddesses (Goddesses - plural, in polygamy with a God, subservient and popping out human hatchlings of course) of their own worlds, so this discovery reinforces the necessity for additional Gods over habitable planets. For other Fundamentalists this can pose a problem to the humanocentric ideals of a universe existing for our own sole purposes. Maybe we aren't the chosen people, or perhaps as the storyline in Battlestar Galactica goes, the twelve tribes scattered, but not just to this earth.
This system is 41 light years away, located within my constellation: Cancer.
In the past 12 years, since the first exoplanet was discovered there have been over 260 others identified. This system, Cancri 55, has been measured exhaustively and scientists do believe that a stable, rocky planet exists within the star's habitable zone.
Good news for science, bad news for theists.
- rick, excited by discoveries.
Can human beings control the weather? It looks like they're getting close to steering the most devastating of all storms, the hurricanes, and maybe dampening the severity of the most violent of them.
From the article:
Moshe Alamaro, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told The Sunday Telegraph of his plans to "paint" the tops of hurricanes black by scattering carbon particles – either soot or black particles from the manufacture of tyres – from aircraft flying above the storms. The particles would absorb heat from the sun, leading to changes in the airflows within the storm. Satellites could also heat the cloud tops by beaming microwaves from space.
"If they're done in the right place at the right time they can affect the strength of the hurricane," Mr Alamaro said.
This isn't all good news, however. When we start playing God with destruction, who gets to choose where the storms don't go, and more importantly, where they do go?
Lawyers warn that diverting a hurricane from one city to save life and property could result in multi-billion dollar lawsuits from towns that bear the brunt instead.
That raises so many quandaries. The ethics alone are worthy of intense study by people who have souls, which means that our elected officials shouldn't be involved.
- rick, considering the possibilities.
We are discovering more about astrophysics every day, but many things bring up more questions than answers. Here are the most amazing Space-Based Mysteries:
10. Dark Matter.
It's theorized, but what is really known about it. It emits no radiation, can't be observed directly and its presence is only suspected based on how it affects other matter. It's the substance that makes all the formulas work properly.
9. Exoplanets.
These bodies are everywhere, but it's only been recently that we've had the technology to find them. They range from Jupiter-dwarfing gas giants whose masses are just shy of being stars to small, rocky ones orbiting dim, red dwarfs. The chances are very good of finding earth-like planets soon, as the techniques and technologies improve.
8. Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.
This is our best evidence of the Big Bang. It's residual electromagnetic radiation that fills the universe. Basically it's photons that are still cooling and have been ever since the plasma explosion that created everything.
We've been hearing about the Asian Bird Flu for a number of years. It's been couched in a lot of "if's." If the strain mutates, and if a vaccine isn't developed quickly enough, and if the problem isn't isolated, or if the mutation is widespread . . . a lot of if's in order to come to one very scary possibility: a worldwide pandemic killing millions of people, a percentage comparable to the 1918 Influenza Epidemic.
One of those if's is coming closer: the mutation.
The changes are worrying, said Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"We have identified a specific change that could make bird flu grow in the upper respiratory tract of humans," said Kawaoka, who led the study.
"The viruses that are circulating in Africa and Europe are the ones closest to becoming a human virus," Kawaoka said.
Recent samples of virus taken from birds in Africa and Europe all carry the mutation, Kawaoka and colleagues report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Pathogens.
You might have heard of this - a guy in Erie, Pennsylvania stumbled upon a way to burn salt water. Well, what it really seems to do is to separate salt water into oxygen and hydrogen, and then the hydrogen burns.
The guy, John Kanzius, was experimenting with radio waves. Under certain frequencies various elements can heat up. He was trying to use these frequencies to target specific parts of the body to burn away cancer cells. Someone asked him if there was an application in water desalinization and when he tried it, he found that salt water burns. And, that it burns quickly enough and with enough heat (3000 deg. F) that it can be used as a fuel.
Imagine fueling up a car with the most plentiful substance on earth? Water. Imagine the by products of burning water, ummm salt and oxygen.
There are some questions I haven't heard the answers to, like how much energy is input to create the radio signal, versus how much energy is output in the form of heat? You can't get something for nothing, of course.
Here's an article. And here's a video montage of news stories about it.
Continue reading "Science Friday: A Fuel Alternative - Salt Water?" »
Who would have thought that there is a contest for tiny sculptures - I mean tiny as in electron microscope tiny. Well there is, it's called the Nanofabrication Bizarre/Beautiful Micrograph Contest.
Here are some of my favorites:
Artificial Nano “T4 Bacteriophage”
that one is magnified 25,000 times.
Continue reading "Science Friday - Extremely Tiny Photography" »
Explorers long searched for an elusive Northwest passage - a northern open water shipping route around North America - only to find that it didn't exist. Now it does. For the first time in history there is open water from Greenland to the Bering Strait. This is disturbing news, not for the shipping or commerce mind you, but for the increasing rate of melting at the Pole.
According to Leif Toudal Pedersen from the Danish National Space Centre, the ice-covered area (light green in this image) is currently around 3 million sq km, which is about 1 million sq km less than the previous minimum levels recorded in 2005/6. Over the last ten years the sea ice coverage has shrunk by around 100,000 sq km per year, so a drop of 1 million sq km in just one year is an enormous change.
This is the image - the orange line shows open water and the green shaded area is the ice.
Now can we please stop arguing about whether global warming is real or whose fault it is? Let's just do something about it.
- rick, shaking his head.
We're facing a lot of challenges in the future. As oil gets more expensive our transportation costs are going to rise. Sustainability is going to become more difficult to achieve and in our cities, fresh produce will be rarer. Fortunately there are some innovative solutions. One of those is Vertical farming for compact spaces. It's inspirational.
From ecogeek: Some features of the "Center for Urban Agriculture" (CUA):
All this in less than an acre.
- rick, encouraged.
A lot of people don't like spiders and very few are comfortable having spiders on their skin, but when there are a lot of spiders around, there are fewer annoying bugs of all other varieties, like mosquitoes. Just ask Jane - at her sister's cabin there aren't many mosquitoes, but there are a lot of spiders. It's a trade-off. For me, I'll take the spiders.
I remember when we worked together in Phoenix, Alan had something about him which caused black widows to chase him. Scary, but funny.
Today's report comes from Lake Tawakoni State Park in Texas. There is a social network of spiders which produced a web bigger than any I've ever heard of. It spans the trail and drapes 200 yards of trees, shrubs, and ground.
The amazing thing is that there are many species of spiders working in cooperation in this massive creation. It's a very rare occurrence, but if the conditions are right they'll make a temporary alliance of sorts. Nature is very cool. Here's the link to the newest article.
And here's the photo.
This reminds me of a moth invasion in Holland I believe. The caterpillars and larvae essentially consumed the town. Here's a photo essay of that occurance. Click it, but not if you're eating.
- rick, I would picnic under that web.
Another photo after the jump
Continue reading "Science Friday - The Coolest Spider Web" »
Did you know that there is only a single piece of art on the moon? It's an aluminum sculpture of an astronaut in a space suit.
The Plaque that accompanies the sculpture is pretty amazing. At the height of the Cold War, during the space race, the plaque contains fourteen names - 8 American and 6 Soviet - of astronauts who died during missions or training up to 1971. The following is copied from the wiki entry:
I know I've heard about this sculpture and plaque before, but it took until now for the significance to sink in.
- rick, a bit slow
After the jump is an interesting image of water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. Take a look and tell me if you see in this image that which I see in the image.
Imagine being blinded and then thrown into freeway traffic.
That is what was done to the Yangtze River Dolphin, or baiji. There is so much pollution in the Yangtze River that the dolphins couldn't sound their way around. For a mammal which can pick out a dime on the ocean floor to run into boats and boat propellers makes very little sense until you discover that the debris in the river and the sludge being dumped provides sensory overload, or Sonar blinding. These poor dolphins are left with so much confusion that they just couldn't manage. An entire species (although at the last count - previous - there were only 13 known individuals.
Blinded in water that light barely penetrates because of the pollution. Blinded on one of the busiest waterways on earth.
Blinded, frightened.
Now completely extinct.
A whole host of firsts accompanies this confirmation. The Yangtze River Dolphin, baiji, is now extinct. It was one of the rarest mammal species
An intensive six-week multi-vessel visual and acoustic survey carried out in November–December 2006, covering the entire historical range of the baiji in the main Yangtze channel, failed to find any evidence that the species survives. We are forced to conclude that the baiji is now likely to be extinct, probably due to unsustainable by-catch in local fisheries. This represents the first global extinction of a large vertebrate for over 50 years, only the fourth disappearance of an entire mammal family since AD 1500, and the first cetacean species to be driven to extinction by human activity. Immediate and extreme measures may be necessary to prevent the extinction of other endangered cetaceans, including the sympatric Yangtze finless porpoise (Neophocaena phocaenoides asiaeorientalis).
- Rick, saddened.
John at Axial Tilt has been working on lab activities for high school science classes and the topic is - Hurricanes. His post is exceptional and I'm borrowing from it liberally. It involves this map (click for the full image)
The image is a compilation of the tracks for every hurricane that has happened across the globe between 1985 and 2005. !! Those blobs of color actually resolve out to points mapping out the position of the storms at 6 hour intervals and whose color denotes the strength of the storm at that point. (The colors map to the Safir-Simpson Hurricane Scale.)
The thing that I found so compelling was that you can really see the overall patterns of hurricane formation and movement at this scale. North of the equator, they start in the low latitudes and travel westward before most of them turn to the north and ultimately end up traveling back to the east above 30 degrees N latitude. And the storms in the southern hemisphere (called tropical cyclones instead of hurricanes, btw) mirror that behavior - traveling westward, turning south and then moving east below 30 degrees S latitude. And the complete absence of them at the equator. By all accounts, it is physically possible for a storm to cross the equator, but there are no records of one actually succeeding.
If you have any questions, please run over to his post and ask in his comments. Not only does he understand it better than me, but he's a hell of a lot nicer.
- Rick, science nerd.
A team of researchers from Germany led by Axel Nothnagel have been using radio waves to measure the Earth's diameter and they have concluded that the earth is 5 millimeters smaller than believed. Which seems like an insignificant amount except when we consider all of the sensitive equipment, from Satellites to Missiles, Lasers to GPS, that rely on the precise accuracy of the mathematics in orbital stations.
I imagine that everything is going to get a software upgrade soon . . .
What would be fun is to start a general panic like Y2K over the recalibration needed for this discovery.
Oh, and I think it's very cool that someone's got the chops to do such accurate measurements. Although I did add two stones to the very top of Mount Hood when I was up there and I'm sure that's the statistical average difference. So, it was all me, thank you. Thank you.
- Rick, science junkie.
From Wikipedia, regarding hornets:
So, there I was, climbing onto a porch roof to reposition a client's gutter. I pulled the downspout out of the upper gutter, shook it to free it of all clogged debris, then put it back on. Then I stepped onto my ladder, which was extended upward to the higher roof, where I fastened the main gutter back onto the house.
Simple. Right?
Then I felt pain in my ankle. I looked down and immediately saw a hornet stinging through my sock. Instead of my heavy-duty work shoes, I had on my mesh tennis shoes because it was going to be a short day and I needed to run some errands after work.
Don't panic.
We've
lost the relationship we used to have to our food.
I just finished reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan and it confirmed some of my strongly held and a lot of my loosely held beliefs about food. It's motivated me to develop a healthy relationship with my food.
What does that mean? Once upon a time people in this country, in the world, knew where there food came from, how it was grown/processed, and what they were eating. Now we have no clue other than “it comes from the supermarket” or “from the restaurant.” Where does your food come from? You might be surprised to learn that “from a farm” is no longer an appropriate response for that question with almost all kinds of meat and produce.
Factory farms and feedlots bear as close a resemblance to a traditional farm as Walmart's paved parking lot does to a field. Food isn't grown, so much as machined into existence. So much chemical fertilizer is placed down that the soil no longer matters. So much pesticide is placed on the crops that you're guaranteed a monolith of exactly the item being made. Animals never get to graze, never see the sun, never have an unregimented day from their birth to their death.
“But I buy my food Organic, from Whole Foods Market or Trader Joe's.”
The Egyptian Pyramids were cast in place. The stones weren't cut at a quarry and dragged to the site.
At the end of their most recent paper reporting these findings, the researchers reflect that it is "ironic, sublime and truly humbling" that this 4,500-year-old limestone is so true to the original that it has misled generations of Egyptologists and geologists and, "because the ancient Egyptians were the original-albeit unknowing-nanotechnologists."
This is really big news . . . and not just for history. For the present, for science, and for the environment:
"How energy intensive and/or complicated can a 4,500 year old technology really be? The answer to both questions is not very," Barsoum explains. "The basic raw materials used for this early form of concrete-limestone, lime, and diatomaceous earth-can be found virtually anywhere in the world," he adds. "Replicating this method of construction would be cost effective, long lasting, and much more environmentally friendly than the current building material of choice: Portland cement that alone pumps roughly 6 billion tons of CO2 annually into the atmosphere when it's manufactured."
I love science.
- rick, amazed.
In order to provide a computer work around for the divide by zero problem encountered in equations, nitwit James Anderson, PhD, invented a new value and is touting it as an elegant answer to 1200 years worth of problems. He calls it a nullity and shows it represented like this:
Programmers have been writing quick subroutine workarounds to mathematical lockups for years - since computers began calculations - and they didn't need to name it or try to teach it to school children as an additional mathematical concept. This isn't much more than a trick, which is why he didn't submit to a math journal and get peer review before he began his P.R. blitz.
My Heritage has an on-line demo of face recognition software. It matches you up, supposedly, with celebrities who share the most critical facial features. Here's who I'm most closely related to, in an apparent three-way tie:
Liam Neeson (66% match)
Chess Champion, Nigel Short (66%)
and, finally
Rutger Hauer (66%)
Interesting.
Rick the doubtful
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