Black holes turn into fuzzballs and destroy a thousand sci-fi plots
Until today, the understanding I had of black holes was as a spherical “event horizon” with a singularity at the centre. The event horizon is the surface of no return – anything which goes past it can never escape. The singularity is where quantum gravity kicks in, and is very handy for evading the speed-of-light…
Bluejay Catching a Bug
My friend and colleague, Balázs Tarnai, shared these pictures of a bluejay catching a bug on his garage roof.
Are We Alone? New Analysis Suggests Life Could Be Extremely Rare In the Universe| Statistics Crush Optimism in Search for Extraterrestrials | Search for Life, SETI | Space.com
Again with the mean scientists! Using a statistical method called Bayesian reasoning, they argue that the life here on Earth could be common, or it could be extremely rare — there’s no reason to prefer one conclusion over the other. With their new analysis, Spiegel and Turner say they have erased the one Drake factor…
Can a Playground Be Too Safe?
After observing children on playgrounds in Norway, England and Australia, Dr. Sandseter identified six categories of risky play: exploring heights, experiencing high speed, handling dangerous tools, being near dangerous elements (like water or fire), rough-and-tumble play (like wrestling), and wandering alone away from adult supervision. The most common is climbing heights. “Climbing equipment needs to…
Is Google Ruining Your Memory? | Wired Science | Wired.com
Predictably, Wired celebrates the freedom that comes from depending on computers instead if your own memory. (The story includes a link to Nicholas Carr’s opposing view.) By sharing and comparing our memories, we can ensure that we still have some facts in common, that we all haven’t disappeared down the private rabbit hole of our…
Enjoying the free WiFi at the Carnegie Science Center
The water table in the lobby has been redesigned since our last visit. Great big Tesla coil, in a great big Faraday cage.
Globster
A typo brought me to this page. Weird. A globster, or blob, is an unidentified organic mass that washes up on the shoreline of an ocean or other body of water. The term was coined by Ivan T. Sanderson in 1962[1] to describe the Tasmanian carcass of 1960, which was said to have “no visible…
The Nature of E.B. White – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education
During my research into the inspirations for and the writing of Charlotte’s Web, which took me back to White’s early childhood, I was intrigued by many aspects of his personality: his anxieties and hypochondria, his passionate defense of free speech and civil liberties, his one-man campaign for world government. But nothing else about him caught…
For Seton Hall Hill students and professors, iPads open new paths
Because the headline gets the name of the school wrong, it’s a little hard for me to assess this objectively. I’m glad Katie got so much space to share her experiences, and very glad this story mentions the importance of training and tech support. The story of my students reading Emerson’s Nature is a little…
Nature’s Living Tape Recorders May Be Telling Us Secrets
Posting this to share with students interested in The Hunger Games, which features birds genetically engineered to act as spies. Many birds can mimic sounds but lyrebirds are the masters. They are nature’s living tape recorders, and sometimes their songs can be troubling. For example, when the BBC’s David Attenborough ran into a lyrebird deep…
The incredible floating fire ant
Creepy-cool description of emergent behavior in ant colonies — complex survival strategies that develop when relatively dumb individual insects interact with each other in surprisingly complex ways. Back in the lab, Mlot deposited colonies of 500 to 8,000 ants in large beakers. When gently swirled, each colony spontaneously formed a sphere. Mlot dropped these spheres…
The Blue Marble Shot: Our First Complete Photograph of Earth – Atlantic Mobile
The incredible story behind an image we’ve all seen hundreds of times, possibly the most reproduced photograph in history It’s an iconic image we have all seen hundreds of times, possibly thousands, and probably the most widely reproduced photograph in history. Because it’s in the public domain it has been used for everything from car…
Why GeekDad wants better videogame deaths for his kids (Wired UK)
When my son was young, I noticed that videgames had taught him that problems are surmountable, so long as you have enough tries. That’s not always true, of course, or practical. We had a chat about things dying, and as I struggled to lightly broach the subject with him I ended up talking about the…
Stink bugs meet their nemesis in Asian wasp
Someone needs a basic geometry lesson. Brown marmorated stink bugs lay especially beautiful egg clusters — sea green with exactly 27 to 28 eggs in each mass. The assemblage of eggs looks a little like a one-dimensional view of a stack of cannon balls. Stink bugs meet their nemesis in Asian wasp – USATODAY.com. A…
Sledding in Spring Break Snow
My wife suddenly decided I should be a Good Dad (TM) and take the kids sledding. (I said okay, as long as she was coming along, too. There she is at the bottom of the hill, way in the background.) Our hilly campus was almost deserted, since we’re starting our three-day spring break.
Feeding a Neighbor’s Lambs
A neighbor invited us over to help feed the lambs they are raising in their garage. (The mother sheep died, and her lambs needed more care than the owners could manage.) The lambs are Piccolo and Brown Sugar.
NASA's Extreme Planet Makeover
This is my “Super Earth,” about 2.75 times the volume of our planet, orbiting very close to a wimpy Class M star. (Thanks for the link, Jefe.)
Chimp "Girls" Play With "Dolls" Too–First Wild Evidence
As my 12-year-old son gets ready to surpass my six-foot height any day (his lip needs a third shave, but he’s apparently in no rush to graduate away from calling me “Daddy”) and as my 8-year-old navigates a peer community that includes mean girls and true friends, gallant young gentlemen (thank you, little boy who…
Nasa reveals bacteria that can live on arsenic instead of phosphorus
A bacterium discovered in a Californian lake appears to be able to use arsenic in its molecular make-up instead of phosphorus – even incorporating the toxic chemical into its DNA. That’s significant because it goes against the general rule that all terrestrial life depends on six elements: oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus. These…