The Latest from Expedition Titanic

By: | September 1, 2010

Hurricane Danielle and its 40-foot-tall waves drove Expedition Titanic back to port on Monday, but not before crew members recorded this haunting HD video of the RMS Titanic on August 29th.  Each time I watch this footage, I feel a sense of awe and emptiness. So much silent, eerie, lacy beauty, so much spooky preservation–all under the immense, inexorable pressure of the Atlantic Ocean.  How much more can the Titanic endure before it collapses?

The expedition’s principal investigator James Delgado, a nautical archaeologist of my acquaintance, yesterday described the ocean floor as the world’s largest museum. As a non-diver, I doubt that I will ever roam its wrecks myself. Thank you, James and your fellow crewmembers, for showing us the Titanic at its most frail and wondrous.

The great ship now looks almost human to me.

A Glorious Year for Crop Circles and Crop Rectangles

By: | August 31, 2010

Remember that billowing cloud of ash from Iceland that floated over Britain and other parts of northern Europe this past spring, shutting down airspace from London to Hamburg and filling airports with fuming travellers? It wasn’t all bad, I discovered yesterday. In fact if you were an archaeologist, particularly a British archaeologist, that plume of frozen magma had a real silver lining. It created, in concert with one of the driest springs in recent memory in England, almost perfect conditions for the discovery of cropmarks.

Until yesterday morning, I had never heard of cropmarks. But it turns out that I’ve been missing a lot. Cropmarks are very cool phenomena–a vast green geometry that signals the presence of buried archaeological sites. Think circles,  rectangles,  squares, and other patterns created by vegetation lying atop buried ruins, from Bronze-Age causeways to Iron-Age tombs. Continue reading →

Abstruse Goose: Make a Wish

By: | August 30, 2010

I’m not exactly sure what this is a picture of — I’ve seen it somewhere, maybe a graphic picture of noise? some computer thing? — but given his title, Abstruse Goose clearly means us to think of it as stars.

#1.  It looks real.  #2.  Abstruse Goose, if you’re out there, can you tell us what that picture really is? please?

http://abstrusegoose.com/20

IVF: A Great Investment

By: | August 27, 2010
3.5 million children have been born worldwide following treatment with assisted reproductive technologies (ART)

Last summer, I wrote an article for the magazine New Scientist about a bold new initiative to provide low-cost in vitro fertilization—for as little as $300 per cycle—to poor women in developing countries. The article, entitled Cheap IVF offers hope to childless millions, described initiatives by the Swiss-based Low Cost IVF Foundation and the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) to offer IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies (ART) to women in Africa and elsewhere who cannot afford the the procedures. The need is great: some ten to 30 percent of African couples are infertile, often as the result of untreated sexually-transmitted diseases or post-delivery pelvic infections. Childless African women are often branded with a terrible stigma, facing public ridicule, abandonment or divorce.

My biggest surprise lay not in reporting the story, which was inspiring, but in reading the online comments after the article was published. Many of them were vituperative, asking why women in Africa, a continent with a high birth rate, deserved such technologies. Those were the mild remarks: others were outright racist. (In fact, the United Nations predicts that the number of children per woman in Africa is predicted to decline to less than three by 2050.) Continue reading →

Making a Really Big Galaxy

By: | August 26, 2010

This is how astronomers think giant galaxies form super-massive black holes (the adjectives are the astronomers’).  Way back at the beginning, maybe a billion years after the birth of a 14 billion year old universe, enormous galaxies a hundred times bigger than the Milky Way were born, pulling themselves together out of clouds of stars and hydrogen gas into spirals.   Neighboring spirals swirled into each other, swooped back out leaving long plumes called tidal tails, fell back together again, over and over, until they couldn’t pull apart any more and gradually merged into a single galaxy.  During the merger, the bright gas was pulled by gravity toward the center into a more brilliant central disk, and inside the disk, finally, no one knows how, gravity won entirely and the gas collapsed into a single point so massive and dense that light itself was caught in a black hole.  Or at least, that’s the story.  It’s probably true, though observations of the young universe are hard to make.  So to help observers know what to look for, theorists make computer simulations.  This is a simulation. Continue reading →

Studying All the Things in Infinity

By: | August 24, 2010

Today,  I’m venturing backstage at Last Word on Nothing,  a rather frantic place at the best of times. Ann has just published a very cool new book on a group of astronomers who created this beautiful map of the universe, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Her book is called A Grand and Bold Thing, and I was curious about Ann’s work on it.

Q: What do you like most about astronomers?

In the first place, I like astronomy itself: you look up in the night sky, and infinity is right there and full of stuff. In the second place, astronomers are devoting their lives and very smart selves to studying all that stuff in infinity and what they study—they don’t like it when I say this—will never conceivably matter or affect us in any way. Aesthetically and spiritually, that’s lovely.

Q: The hero of your book, Jim Gunn, is an amazing and very entertaining character. He says what he thinks, he’s stubborn, opinionated, and he sure as hell gets things done. Tell us about him.

He’d make a good book all by himself. Physically, he looks a little homeless though harmless, and if he walked into my middle-class neighborhood, somebody would ask him if he needed help finding his way back out again. He’s extremely polite and draws you out so kindly that you end up having a good opinion of yourself.  That’s unsettling because when you finally get him to talk, you see that while you’ve been vaguely prattling on, he’s been thinking complicated and sharp things which he can explain in the clearest way, and you think to yourself, “why don’t I just shut up now.” And he’s a splendid writer with perfect control of sentence rhythms. And he can write about a thing you’ve haven’t a hope of understanding and somehow you get it. One of his fellow astronomers described Jim’s writing as “clear and simple is the Lord.” Continue reading →

Perseids against the Milky Way, Sigh

By: | August 23, 2010

The Perseids are reliable, regular shooting stars, a meteor shower that shows up nights in late July every year.  I didn’t see the Perseids this year myself because Baltimore’s skies are a rich carnelian haze that hold nothing much and certainly not meteorites.  And Heather didn’t see them because, she thinks, of light pollution.  To comfort ourselves, we post this video of the Perseid meteor shower, taken against the Milky Way.  It must have been done over several nights or from several different angles or something.  Nevertheless, astounding. I’m astounded.

Joshua Tree Under the Milky Way from Henry Jun Wah Lee on Vimeo.