WORMHOLES
I feel like this is a bigger deal than just some Collgehumor video.
Electronic Tattoo Display runs on Blood
Remember getting your mind really blown by new technology?
Clive Thompson on Science Fiction
"If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas."
Have you ever wondered what space smells like? Yeah, me neither.
NASA beams the Beatles into space
NASA broadcast "Across The Universe" into outer space using the Deep Space Network. Asked to comment, Paul McCartney wisely noted, "Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens."
The Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-ice Robotic Antarctic Explorer (ENDURANCE) is a $2.3 million project funded by NASA's Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets Program. It's autonomous underwater vehicle designed to swim untethered under ice, creating three-dimensional maps of underwater environments, and ostensibly is a test for exploring Europa, the icy Jovian moon that just might harbor life.
The Archive of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences: as amazing as it sounds.
Literally!
I love it when the New York Times gets all tripped out on science stuff.
Hugest Black Hole Ever Discovered
18 billion times the size of our sun!
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March 2006 Archives
This bird has blown
Archived From March 21, 2006 (3) Comments
If you can't infer from the heady smell of musk and cheap cologne emanating from your computer screen, let me inform you officially and scientifically that this is the Universe Sex Issue. Although, as a serious science forum, Universe tends to avoid this terrifically subjective topic, I was asked to write a column for the LA Alternative Sex Issue a few weeks ago, and decided to rise to the challenge. 2006 is all about getting into the spirit of things. Besides, I am not a square.
But before you loosen your belts too much, know that things are staying strictly Animal Kingdom. Although I am a firm proponent of putting the "hard" in "cold, hard facts," (ewww, sorry) there is enough smut, good-natured and otherwise, on the web to keep you busy for the rest of your perverted life, and I do not intend to add to it.
It is an interesting specificity of the human race that we are generally ignorant of the sex lives of animals. We people are so concerned with getting tail, it seems, that we easily forget that a large percentage of this planet is populated by creatures with tails (and fins, and wings, and claws) that are pretty much looking for the same thing. Of course, there are those Nature Channel documentary films of lions humping in the veldt. I can't help, when I see those, reacting with fascinated repulsion at just how similar that feline act looks to human sex. The inherent grossness of mammalian moans alone may explain our active disinterest in animal reproduction. Yet, while a great deal of the natural world is busy freaking us out with open-air acts of bestial pornography, there are droves of creatures getting busy in far more graceful ways.
Take the neatness of single-celled organisms splitting in half, for example. Or, the heroic struggle of salmon swimming upstream, already halfway to their deaths, just to fertilize their slimy eggs. And birds, home from some transcontinental migration, paired up in their nests, flagrantly making bird-sex, which, come to think of it
Wait, do you know how our feathered friends go about reproduction? Sure, they lay eggs, but what comes before that? If you are like me, the thought has literally never crossed your mind. Hopefully, you are having the same moment of awkward realization I just had. "Do male birds," you may be asking yourself, "have penises?" The thought is terrifying: If they do, then are we living beneath a sky full of tiny, flying phalluses? Gross, right?
The unsettling answer to this absurd question is: well, we are, kind of. The avian phallus, of which I have yet to find any photographic proof, remains tucked away in the feathered confines of the unholy bird-nooks of mostly land-lubbing birds (notably ostriches and turkeys). Apparently, there is one species of Argentine lake duck with a penis 42.5 centimeters long but that, thankfully, is an exception to the rule.
The rest of the flock (that is to say, almost all birds) are natural eunuchs. Both male and female birds, generally, have the same primary reproductive organ: the
cloaca, a little posterior hole used for all birdly bodily purposes. Although males keep their sperm in a little pocket inside the cloaca, and females have ovaries in theirs, their exterior reproductive organs are identical. As are, incidentally, their intestinal and urinary tract openings, since they are one and the same. This crosses out, of course, the standard sexiness of penis-in-vagina sex. Birds, with typical weird efficiency, have a neat and completely un-sexy solution.
During copulation, the female bird coyly moves her tail to the side and the male moves very close to her. He moves the opening of his cloaca close to hers -- a butt-to-butt movement that is both cute and, I imagine, compromising -- so that the sperm can enter the female cloaca, in what is very seriously referred to by ornithologists as a "cloacal kiss." This can happen very fast, sometimes in less than one second. I imagine that neither participant even makes a peep.
After the awkward butt-kiss, the female bird can store the sperm inside her for up to a year, or until she feels emotionally ready to raise chicks. Eggs then descend one-by-one from the female bird's ovaries and become fertilized by the stored sperm, before being laid into the family nest. No muss, no fuss.
And no ruffled feathers.
8:20 PM | Permalink | (3) Comments
Clumper'd in balls of clouds
Archived From March 19, 2006 (2) Comments
Despite the completely irrational nature of the rainstorms that have been sporadically whipping Los Angeles, we on Earth are lucky, weather-wise. We don't have to deal with rains of sulphuric acid droplets, nor infinite giant hurricanes like those which make up Jupiter's red spot or the dark spot on Venus, which, until the mid-1990's, consisted of storms larger than our entire planet. We don't have helium condensation dripping on our heads, or oceans of ethane blanketing our meteor-battered landscape. Our atmosphere isn't blisteringly hot and poisonous, nor freezing and whipped with unforgiving winds, as seems to be the norm in the rest of the galaxy, on all the other planets which stubbornly continue to exist and be strange, despite how much I can't handle thinking about them.
Rather, denizens of Earth are privy to a soft blueness, which is generally forgiving, and a rational flow of water particles, which result in the pillowy white puffs we call "clouds." Our clouds, too, are only condensations of water vapor -- not swirls of ammonia and methane. They're not as psychedelic and colorful as the dense clouds of surging ammonia ice which blanket Saturn, but at least we can see the sky through them most of the time.
Our sky is big, of course, so big as to warrant something aviation specialists call "Big Sky Theory" -- the idea that the sky is so big that two bodies traveling through it have a near-zero probability of ever colliding. This is good news for the air-travel-phobic, of course, but it also renders much more impressive the fact that human beings have managed to pose an environmental threat to something so massive that even the clouds can't cover it all.
Of course, we are steadily screwing our sky up, and though I'm sure the runaway greenhouse gases on Earth are never going to trap carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as thoroughly as they do on Venus (where temperatures are 460 degrees celsius all of the time) our sky is still in danger of overheating. Fossil fuel emissions raise the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by a terrifying 4% every year; we'd have to get to virtually zero emissions in the next two decades if we wanted to stop climate change in its tracks, a literal impossibility in a world where environmentalism's marketable cool factor has been irrevocably destroyed by the movie "Bio-Dome" and people who drive cars that look like Nazi tanks.
The notion of weather control is certainly not new, at least on a human time-scale. Scientists have certainly always fantasized about harnessing the power of the atmosphere, for both hostile and good-natured means. There was a devastatingly good article in Harper's two months ago about this (recommended to me, like many things, by my awesome friend Dean Bein, and is a recommendation I pass on to y'all, if you can find it), called "Owning the Weather," by Ando Arike which I feel profoundly inadequate even referring to, so I won't dally on the subject long.
In any case, I tripped out pretty hard recently when I learned that "cloud seeding" is a fairly common, albeit only tenuously worthwhile, practice. By dispersing into clouds chemicals which allow water droplets or ice crystals to form more easily, climatologists can change the amount of precipitation a cloud yields. While reduced cloud cover is pretty visibly achieved, it's impossible to know if cloud-seeding works to, say, make more rain, because it's impossible to know how much precipitation would have occurred had the cloud not been "seeded" in the first place, which is kind of a cool little Zen koan. The practice is used today to increase precipitation in drought areas, to reduce the size of hailstones that form in thunderstorms, and to reduce the amount of fog in and around airports.
Interestingly, the use of silver iodide as the primary chemical in the seeding of clouds was discovered by an atmospheric scientist called Bernard Vonnegut, the brother of (the novelist) Kurt Vonnegut. As an aside, Vonnegut (Kurt, that is) used some of Vonnegut's (Bernard, that is) ideas about ice crystallography in Cat's Cradle, which, satisfyingly, makes for another nice synaptic connection between the arts and sciences in history.
Many physicists believe that the end of the Universe may come in the form of something they call "The Big Chill:" as the Universe continues to slowly expand, all the stars might, one by one, dim out, the black holes would evaporate, and everything else, generally, would disintegrate into a dilute sea of particles. If this kind of "Chill" happens, life as we know it -- human life, sexy life, life with furry things and airplanes -- could not persist. It would be too cold, for one thing, not to mention the fact that the space-time continuum would be stretched beyond recognition. Humanity could not exist in a Universe so dispersed that it is effectively a void.
Consciousness may well continue, in altered forms. The wholly legitimate physicist Freeman Dyson, father of the discipline of cosmic eschatology (good vocabulary word, eschatology: the study of the end of the Universe), believes that "all conscious life will take the form of interstellar dust clouds," as "an ever-expanding network of charged dust particles, communicating by electromagnetic forces, has all the complexity necessary for thinking about an infinite number of novel thoughts." These clouds, spread over billions of light-years of space, could continue to think an infinite amount of thoughts using the finite amount of left-over energy by spending a large percentage of their existence in a kind of atmospheric hibernation.
The consciousness of inorganic sentient clouds sounds insane, of course, but so does human life, after all -- carbon and water-based lumps of bipedal flesh, powered by the few square inches of protoplasm inside of delicate skulls? Life as we know it has only been on this planet for a couple hundred thousand years, and, though we humans have a hell of a lot of temerity in the face of even our own atmosphere -- boldly shooting rockets and airplanes through our nice clouds, burning holes in the ozone layer with cans of hairspray, puffing fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere -- we are perhaps only the inauspicious debut to the the millennial reign of eschatological brain-clouds. The fact that we may someday turn into clouds ourselves seems to me like a cosmic table-turning scenario.
If that's not a good enough reason to stop driving Hummers, I don't know what is.
3:33 PM | Permalink | (2) Comments
For Love and Comets
Archived From March 7, 2006 (3) Comments
So you think the scientific world is one of cold, hard, facts and impassive objectivity, incapable of bringing tenderness and twee sentimentalism forth into the world? You think that NASA, that behemoth of a governmental organization, spends all its time censoring evolutionary scientists and fucking up stuff on the Hubble telescope? Well, you're right, for the most part!
Right now, however, you are wrong, because NASA has just extracted from the comet particle-embedded aerogel collected by Stardust spacecraft A HEART-SHAPED COMET GEM. The particle is made up of the silicate mineral forsterite, which can found on Earth in gemstones called peridot, but who cares because what a beautiful thing. Go hold hands and look at the stars.
5:39 PM | Permalink | (3) Comments