Probably not God’s fault, but very few people understand that business of hidden dimensions in string theory.
http://abstrusegoose.com/235
When Henry VIII wasn’t off wooing new wives and attending to the pressing affairs of state, he was well…eating. Check this out: it’s a look behind the scenes at Hampton Court’s massive, factorylike kitchen. Now here’s a monarch who would have absolutely loved Julia Child.
Remember a month or so ago, when astronomers running NASA’s Kepler satellite announced they’d release the data on 300 possibly earth-like planets but keep the 400 best possibilities proprietary to NASA and announce it all next February? And non-Kepler astronomers, the media, and the internet fussed at the Kepler astronomers for being dogs-in-the-manger? And then everybody forgot about it? This is such a delight: last week, late July, not February, one of the Kepler astronomers publicly announced the discovery of around 140 earth-like planets, a whole galaxy of earth-like planets. I can’t decide whether it’s an example of scientists incapable of following corporate rules, or scientists congenitally unable to keep quiet, or scientists just behaving like the rest of us.
Patricia Sutherland is a very stubborn woman, the kind of damn-the-torpedoes, full-speed-ahead brand of stubbornness that the Scots and their descendants long ago perfected. Sutherland is an archaeologist at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa and one of the world’s leading experts on the prehistory of the Arctic. Silver-haired, bespectacled, and notably fond of pantsuits, she doesn’t look much like a maverick. But since the late 1990s, Sutherland has been turning Arctic archaeology upside down.
Sutherland proposes that 1000 years or so ago, Norse seafarers–better known in pop culture as the Vikings–took part in a kind of medieval get-rich quick scheme in the Canadian Arctic. According to Sutherland,the Norse traded small bits of wood to Arctic dwellers known as the Dorset for luxurious furs and shimmering walrus ivory that could be sold for a king’s ransom in Europe. And Sutherland is not whistling Dixie. She has assembled an impressive mountain of evidence–from Norse yarn, Norse whetstones and other Norse artifacts found at four sites on Baffin Island and northern Labrador.
You might wonder why you haven’t heard about ancient Norse merchants in the Canadian Arctic. The answer is complex but it largely comes down to this. The search for Norse voyagers in North America is primarily the purview of amateurs and kooks who claim to have turned up Viking runes and ruins all along the Eastern Seaboard. None of these sites, however, with the sole exception of the Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, has been accepted by the archaeological community. Continue reading
Abstruse Goose has the same problem I do but proposes a solution.
Luckily, says Abstruse Goose, not everyone needs to “see so far under the hood.” Continue reading
It’s one of the pitfalls of science journalism: Assigned a story, we rush madly off, interviewing scientists galore, gathering mountains of eclectic facts we’re sure our readers will love. Alas, it’s often impossible to cram all these facts on the printed page, because magazines have space constraints. C’est la vie. But hey, this is the blogosphere, where lost facts come to life again.
So here are some of the odd stories that I unearthed when researching The 12 Dirtiest Fruits and Vegetables, published in the August 2010 issue of Prevention magazine. The feature describes the Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides, produced by the Environmental Working Group. The Guide lists a “dirty dozen” of 12 fruits and vegetables with the highest pesticide residues (as determined by U.S. Department of Agriculture tests) and a “clean 15” of less-contaminated produce. (In fact, many of the items on the “clean 15” list are heavily sprayed, but are peeled before they are tested or eaten, so residues are lower.) Weird fruit-and-veggie facts follow:
Last week a British treasure-hunter, Ian Snook, barely escaped a rather unpleasant end when his metal detector began clicking madly on a beach in Dorset, England. Answering the siren call of potential loot, Snook began digging furiously, only to find a battered metal sign. It read “Precaution–bombs fire instantly on breaking in air. Stringent precautions must be taken to avoid cracking during handling–the caps must never be removed.”
Below lay 24 World-War-Two glass bottles filled with deadly phosphorus and benzene. The British Army had buried these grenade-like weapons 70 odd years ago to dispose of any Nazi landing craft.
The faded sign, with its words of clear warning, prevented Snook from accidentally blowing himself to smithereens. And that’s good: while I am not particularly fond of treasure hunters, I wouldn’t wish this fate on anyone. But this little news item got me thinking. How on earth are we going to warn future generations of archaeologists and other curious types from digging in similarly toxic sites 1000 years from now, or even 10,000 years from now? Continue reading
At 5:04 on the morning of July 16, 2010, I woke up because the bed was vibrating, as was the floor. A small rumbling noise moved through the room and on out, and I thought, “earthquake,” and went back to sleep. It turned out to have been a magnitude 3.6 – pretty big for these parts.
Heather, however, lives in the Pacific Northwest, in the Cascadian subduction zone where a little tectonic plate named Juan de Fuca slides under the western edge of the enormous North American plate. Plates don’t slide under other plates without drama, and around 300 years ago, Cascadia had what was probably a magnitude 9 earthquake; the magnitude scale tops out at 10.
Cascadia has had lots of non-negligible earthquakes since, so geologists pay attention and most recently, have sunk an array of earthquake sensors in the ground above the subducting plate’s leading edge. Along that edge, swarms of small tremors happen, hardly noticeable, but geologists think that understanding those tremors might help predict big earthquakes.
The reason they think that is, while the plate’s leading edge is pushing under North America, the part of the plate farther that’s back, under the Pacific ocean, is stuck, locked in place; and sometime in the next century it should come unstuck and trigger another huge earthquake. So geologists are watching for those little seismic events — they look like the little cardiac events before the big one.
I, luckily, live in Baltimore which is right smack in the middle of the large, stable North American plate that runs to the middle of the Atlantic — and is immune to such cataclysmic goings-on. Except when it’s not. Continue reading
