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Science

U=(N/T)M*G: Hoax

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The science side of humanities was rocked this month by the exposure of three hoaxers. I won’t publish their conclusions or anything, because that’s not really the point of this post, but you can find their nonsense here. The whole impetuous for their shenanigans was bullshit, from start to finish, in my opinion. What basically happened was these three found out about a study they didn’t like. In an effort to undermine the field that study came out of, as well as undermine the humanities in general, these hoaxers put out 20 fake papers to academic journals to see if … Read more

Puppy-Size Roaches (and Other Bizarre Creatures) From “Beyond the Sixth Extinction”

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Beyond the Sixth Extinction

In a toxic urban landscape of the future, what strange (and still oddly familiar) animals might have evolved to survive there? A new book, “Beyond the Sixth Extinction: A Post-Apocalyptic Pop-Up” (Candlewick Press) by Shawn Sheehy, artfully imagines the grotesque creatures that could live in a possible future — one reshaped by disasters so destructive that 75 to 80 percent of life on Earth went extinct. How odd would this world’s inhabitants be? Imagine a giant, flightless pigeon that carries its young in pouches under its wings, a freshwater turtle with a shell fortified by heavy metals, and a cockroach … Read more

SPACE: Making Nuclear Pasta – Live Science

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Nuclear Pasta

How to cook “nuclear pasta” in three easy steps: 1. Boil one large, dying star until it goes supernova and explodes. (This could take a billion years, so be patient.) 2. Vigorously stir any leftover protons and electrons inside the star’s shriveled core until they merge into a soup of ultradense neutrons. Apply as much gravity as necessary. 3. Scrunch the neutron stew into an airtight sphere the size of Toronto. Cover in a crystalline crust and serve at 1.08 million degrees Fahrenheit (600,000 degrees Celsius). Voila! You have just made one of the universe’s strangest concoctions — nuclear pasta. … Read more

SCIENCE: The Human Eye Can See ‘Ghost Images’

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eye - pixabay

Scientists have discovered that the human eye has a spooky ability. It can detect “ghost images.” These are images that are encoded in random patterns, previously thought only detectable by computer. But in a new paper posted online on the preprint server arXiv, scientists in Scotland at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow have found that the human eye itself can do the required computations. “Although the brain can’t individually see them, the eye is somehow detecting all of the patterns, and then keeping the information there and summing everything together,” said study co-author Daniele Faccio, a … Read more

SCIENCE: Can We Revive an Ice-Age Horse?

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ice age horse

A team of scientists in Siberia is hopeful that a mummified 40,000-year-old baby horse can provide critical genetic material for cloning the extinct ice-age species. But experts told Live Science that they are skeptical that the scientists will be able to find viable DNA on the body at all, let alone overcome the enormous challenges of cloning a species that’s been extinct for millennia. Revived after millennia? The preserved foal’s body was discovered in August and was excavated from melting permafrost in the Batagaika crater in Yakutia, a region in eastern Russia. Researchers working with the frozen remains recently told … Read more

SCIENCE: Hunting the “Dark Photon”

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dark photon - pixabay

Almost everything is missing. And a team of physicists is trying to find all of it. The universe as we know it includes about a tenth of the total stuff that’s out there. The rest? Missing. Invisible. Undetectable, except through the effects of its gravity on the fraction of stuff that we can see. Researchers call that missing stuff the dark sector — the class of energetic and massive particles that seemingly must exist out there somewhere but that don’t interact with luminous matter (the stuff we’re made of, along with everything we can see) in any way we can … Read more

SCIENCE: Could Sticky Corn Fight Pollution?

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sticky corn

It probably doesn’t look like any corn you’ve seen. At 16 feet (5 meters), it stands about twice as tall as conventional corn. And sticking out of the stalks, high above the ground, are aerial roots, red finger-like protrusions coated in slime. But despite this alien-like goo, this species of corn — indigenous to the Sierra Mixe region of Oaxaca, Mexico, where the locals have long been cultivating and eating it — is remarkable for another reason. It’s the only corn that scientists know of that can take in nitrogen directly from the air and use it to grow. Nitrogen … Read more

SCIENCE: Where Dreams Come From

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Enjoy dreaming? Two key genes may be to thank. A new study in mice finds that these “dream genes” are essential to that phase of slumber that brings people bizarro-world visions of taking high school math tests naked, losing teeth and soaring through the air. Without the genes, called Chrm 1 and Chrm 3, mammals would not experience rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, during which the brain is as active as it is during wakefulness but the body is paralyzed. The discovery is important, researchers said, because poor sleep and psychiatric disorders are linked. So, understanding the basic control of … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Jello

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Jupiter, space, Jello, discoveries, plot bunnies   That title is a little misleading, I know. It’s actually in reference to what my astrophysicist friend told me about the bigger planet in our system. The ridiculously awesome Jupiter. A couple years back, the probe Juno inserted into Jupiter’s orbit with the simple, massive, mission of gathering data. Scientists, and the world, were astounded by the sheer amount of weirdness and awesome we learned. The cyclones at the poles, the wonky electromagnetic field, the sci-fi-esque core. The core and ground are the parts that really stuck with me. Metallic hydrogen. When I … Read more

SPACE: Could Black Holes Reverse Time?

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black hole - pixabay

As a massive star collapses into a black hole, it sends out a brilliant SOS signal in the form of ultrabright gamma-ray bursts. Now, scientists have found something very peculiar about those mysterious signals: They seem to reverse time. Well, sort of. A new study, published Aug. 13 in The Astrophysical Journal, has found that these gamma-ray bursts are time-reversed, meaning the brilliant light wave is spit out one way and then sent out again in the opposite order. The researchers said they have no idea what’s causing these time-reversed gamma-ray signals, but they added that the physics around black … Read more