Crop circles have moved well past circles. Now they’re jellyfish, dragonflies, and trilobites, drawn using higher math, computers, laser pointers, and GPS’s. A lovely little essay by a physicist in a recent Nature calls them “modern mathematical artworks” and hopes that this summer will produce a “bumper batch.” They seem to have no larger meaning, just that they’re quixotic, beautiful, and I thought you’d like them. Continue reading
Pay attention to the quote below the drawing. John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist whose specialities were nuclear physics, gravitation — he created the term, “black hole” — and getting people riled up. He died in 2008 at age 96.
I mean, when Victor Hugo writes that science says the last word on nothing, his sentence is beautiful; but then, he was a writer, and besides, what would he know? When John Archibald Wheeler says it, you can take his word for it
The word, “data” – tables of numbers, incomprehensible graphs — for most of us would make a good sleep aid. For astronomers, though, “data” means a star-sized thing that outshines a galaxy, or a galaxy just being born, or a star that spins in milliseconds. Data for astronomers is a way to survive, a reason to live, a combination of money and ice cream. So when astronomers using the Kepler satellite to find earth-like planets around other suns told their fellow astronomers they were holding back the most promising data, those fellow astronomers reacted as though someone sequestered the ice cream.
In the olden days an astronomer with a telescope looked at his – and yes, it was likely to be “his” – stars and galaxies, took data on their brightness, size, color, distance, and published his wondrous discoveries and put the data in his closet. That proprietary attitude toward data changed a little toward the end of the 20th century, when new telescopes began to be paid for by NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the American taxpayer. Any astronomer who didn’t have his own telescope could use these telescopes and work on his data privately for a year, but then he had to turn it over to the public. So by rights, since Kepler is a NASA-funded satellite that launched over a year ago, the Kepler astronomers should make all 700 cases for possible planets public. Instead, they announced that they’ll release 300 stars that look like they have planets, and keep the 400 of the best stars with the most earthlike candidates for another eight months. Continue reading
Seldom has something so tiny and so unprepossessing exacted such an immense toll of human misery. Plasmodium falciparum, the protozoa that causes the most serious form of malaria, looks like a little red comma or pear-shaped stain on the surface of a red blood cell. Yet make no mistake, this tiny protozoa is a deft killer. In the list of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases, malaria currently ranks fifth, and each year between 1 to 2.7 million people–mainly pregnant women and children–perish of the scourge.
Epidemiologists studying this nasty disease have long searched for its origins, since this data could offer clues for battling P. falciparum. Many researchers have looked to sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting the disease first emerged there some 6000 years ago when early farmers began clearing forests and creating lots of small sunlit basins of stagnant water–breeding grounds for mosquitoes carrying P. falciparum. The large villages of the time, moreover, were thought to have offered a plentiful supply of new hosts for the parasite. Human beings are the only reservoirs for malaria.
But archaeologists have never been keen on this theory: there’s little evidence of agriculture in Africa 6000 years ago. Now a very cool new study in Current Biology by Kazuyuki Tanabe, a biologist at the Osaka Institute of Technology in Japan, and his colleagues, sheds important new light on the matter. It turns out archaeologists were right to be skeptical. Malaria emerged at least 60,000 years ago in Africa, and accompanied modern humans on their momentous journey out of Africa. Continue reading
The elegant Eirene Gown, named for the Greek goddess of peace, is sewn from silk hand-gathered from naturally-hatched wild silkworms and woven on antique looms in a small mill in India. Its delicate coral hue is derived from a dye extracted from the root of the Madder plant, growing in a war zone in the high valleys along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Chevron-shaped appliqués along the neckline come from the discarded part of the shells of the Mabe pearl, gathered and turned into jewelry by women of the Zanzibar Women’s Shellcraft Cooperative. Estimated price tag for the dress: between $3000 to $6000.
Top Shop it ain’t, and it ain’t on sale either: designer Katie Brierley, who produces her Isoude collection “in a slow and sustainable manner,” created the frock for the Fashion Institute of Technology’s new exhibition, Eco-Fashion: Going Green, on show until November 13, 2010. The antithesis of easily-tossed togs on sale in cut-price clothing stores, the Eirene gown is one of more than 100 garments and accessories in the New York exhibition.
Abstruse Goose is a nameless, faceless entity, obviously a mathematician of some sort, who posts extremely funny but occasionally abstruse cartoons at http://abstrusegoose.com.
Cosmology did it to me again. First it started out by saying that the universe is expanding, but all its mutual gravity pulls against the expansion so the universe is actually slowing down and might just end by being pulled into a cosmic black hole. I thought this sounded a little extreme but it made sense, I could live with it.
Then cosmology said no, the universe has some sort of anti-gravity it calls a cosmological constant, and the universe isn’t slowing down after all and it’ll never end, it’ll coast forever. Oh really? Sure, I guess that’s interesting. Then cosmology said sorry, our mistake, no anti-gravity and yes, the universe really is slowing. Well, ok, not a problem for me.
Then cosmology said whoa Nelly! the universe is not only not slowing down, it’s actually speeding up, accelerating, tearing apart fast as it can and faster every minute for some extremely mysterious reason, we haven’t a clue what but we’ll say it’s Dark Energy. Guys!! That makes no sense at all! How can I accept that? Well, said cosmology, you’ll have to adjust and move on because that’s the way it is. So I did.
It wasn’t easy. I worked on it for ten years and finally I could write accelerating universe without putting quotes around it. And I learned to live in a universe that would end torn apart, lonely, black, and blank. But now, cosmology sidles up to me with a smirk and says, guess what? we think we smoothed the cosmic microwave background map too much and now we might have a systematic effect. And if we fix it, then it’s less likely that we need Dark Energy. . . I stopped listening. I can’t deal with it. I despair, I just don’t know what to believe any more. Continue reading
A cow fell out of the sky and crushed me flat. I pushed it aside with all my might, but then – boom! another cow came barreling out of the blue. Again, I shoved it aside, to no avail, because, hey, yet another cow was falling in its wake. After a while, I thought it would be easier to curl up beside the cow for a while and stay just as I was.
This didn’t happen, of course: as far as I know my street has not been bombarded by a plague of tumbling bovines. But in a way, it did: it accurately describes the way I felt during a bout of depression last summer. I am, happily, fully recovered: as the National Institute of Mental Health points out, most people who experience depression get better with treatment. Women, however, may be especially vulnerable: depression and other stress-related illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder are twice as common in women as in men.
A new study published today in the journal Molecular Psychiatry by neuroscientists at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia sheds some light on why this may be so: females (well, female rats, at any rate) are more sensitive to stress hormones and less able to adapt to the hormones than males. Continue reading
