Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Tag: Science

  • Lost planet

    Saw this article on Discover.com earlier this month and thought it was really interesting: The Solar System’s Lost Planet.

    Nesvorny, who runs computer simulations to study how the solar system evolved over time, kept encountering the same problem: The four giant gas planets, whose orbits are comfortably far apart from each other today, kept violently jostling with each other in his models of the early solar system. Jupiter would end up tugging on Uranus or Neptune and casting one of them out into interstellar space. Obviously, that never happened. So Nesvorny came up with a clever explanation: He proposed that a fifth gas giant emerged from the planet-birthing cloud 4.5 billion years ago. Suddenly his simulations started matching reality. The outer planets still jockeyed for position, but this time Jupiter spared Uranus and Neptune and ejected the extra planet instead.

    Not that we’d ever be able to know if this is correct (probably), but it certainly sounds logical. I just hope the Planet X/Nibiru nuts don’t jump all over this as proof of pending doom.

  • The best chicken article I’ve read in awhile.

    Actually this might be the only chicken article I’ve read now that I think about it. It’s long but really good. Did you know the Egyptians “mastered the technique of artificial incubation”? I did not.

    Oh, and don’t forget, chickens are basically the descendants of dinosaurs which is awesome.

  • Timeline of the far future

    On a similar topic to my previous post about the scale of the universe, I’ve been enjoying Wikipedia’s Timeline of the far future for equal amounts of mind-boggling scale. Really, once you hit 1020 years from now the numbers are pretty much meaningless to realistic human comprehension. But when you start hitting the exponents of the exponents? Like 10^10^50 (or to steal Wikipedia’s image: 10^{10^{50}})  then all you can really do is quote:

    Although listed in years for convenience, the numbers beyond this point are so vast that their digits would remain unchanged regardless of which conventional units they were listed in, be they nanoseconds or star lifespans.

  • The Scale of the Universe

    I realized I missed posting in April entirely(!), and I don’t like the look of the gap in the archive calendar, so I’m back-dating this entry.

    And you need to check this out, a Flash-animated Scale of the Universe that is simply mind-boggling. From the smallest structures known (quantum foam, the Planck length) to the largest (the size of the observable universe), that you can zoom in and out on, and it’s all to scale (relative to the zoom level). The coolest thing I’ve seen online lately.

  • Yuri’s Night

    Tomorrow, April 12th, is a pretty momentous date: it is the 50th anniversary of the first human being to launch into space (which took place on April 12, 1961) by Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Appropriately enough, the 12th is also when Yuri’s Night is celebrated, a sort of unofficial holiday “world space party” that commemorates that first flight.

    As someone who grew up with a deep interest in space and astronomy (not to mention science and science fiction) I love the idea of Yuri’s Night and I love what the website is doing: presenting a registry of events that are taking place around the world for the event, and letting people register more at no cost. Mostly it seems entirely fitting to celebrate the occasion; it would be neat to have a Yuri’s Night event here in Bend, but it seems the nearest is Portland.

    50 years of manned spaceflight. That’s something to think about.

  • The truth about vampires

    I realize I’m about a week late blogging this item (should have been around Halloween), but I just can’t resist: Count Dracula not in the numbers, physicist says. A scientist is playing Scully to scientifically disprove the existence of monsters—vampires, zombies, ghosts, and so on.

    Articles like this make me amused and irritated at the same time. I always get a kick of out it when a goofy, kooky topic like this shows up in the “serious” mainstream news, but it annoys me when they purport to have The Answer to things and get their science and logic wrong.

    Case in point: his proof against the existence of vampires is flawed:

    [Costas] Efthimiou takes out the calculator to prove that if a vampire sucked one person’s blood each month — turning each victim into an equally hungry vampire — after a couple of years there would be no people left, just vampires. He started his calculations with just one vampire and 537 million humans on January 1, 1600 and shows that the human population would be down to zero by July 1602.

    Now I’m not saying that vampires do exist, but that’s weak. Yes, you’ve shown us that repeatedly doubling a number increases it exponentially very quickly, but this “proof” is hardly proof. First of all, why the assumption that vampires always make more vampires? If the vampire doesn’t kill you outright, then you become a vampire. I think it’s up to the “source” vampire. No exponential increase.

    Second, couldn’t some of these vampires be feeding on animals instead of humans? (Digression: wouldn’t vampire cows be funny?)

    Third, I’m sure vampires are reasonably intelligent enough to have figured out that if they keep making vampires, there’s no more food left. I imagine they plan accordingly.

    Fourth, where did this “one person per month” figure come from? That seems rather arbitrary.

    So his reasoning is flawed. I think he would be better off arguing against the more implausible vampire myths, such as the physical impossibility of their not casting reflections in mirrors.

    Or, you know, doing real science.

  • Compare and contrast

    Compare and contrast this:

    Global warming over the coming century could mean a return of temperatures last seen in the age of the dinosaur and lead to the extinction of up to half of all species, a scientist said on Thursday.

    With this:

    The earliest civilizations were not a product of favorable conditions but rather a last resort in the face of dramatic shifts in the weather, a climate scientist said on Thursday.

    I’m trying to decide if these are complimentary or contradictory. Or maybe I’m just randomly amused, correlating the climate crisis faced in one article with the results mentioned in another…

    …what we tend to think of today as civilization was an accidental by-product of unplanned adaptation to catastrophic climate change. Civilization was a last resort…

    Interesting stuff.

  • Much Ado About Pluto

    More geeky space news! This is more mainstream-popular, though, as I’ve seen it popping up everywhere. Pluto is no longer a planet. I’m actually a bit surprised at the uproar this seems to be causing; Slashdot has more on this.

    Me, I guess I’ve always been suspicious of Pluto; I mean, the thing has this wildly weird orbit that goes above the plane of the ecliptic and that swings inside Neptune’s orbit. And, it’s smaller than our own moon. And, its own moon, Charon, doesn’t actually orbit around Pluto; rather, they orbit around each other (with the center of axis somewhere between them rather than at Pluto’s center).

    All decidedly un-planetlike.

    So I think reclassifying it is a good move. It doesn’t make it any less mysterious or interesting. I guess I just don’t see why this is such a big deal; Pluto itself didn’t go anywhere.

    So, my two cents.

    And, getting even geekier (possible?), the Wikipedia article on Pluto mentions it “is the prototype of a yet-to-be-named family of trans-Neptunian objects.” Trans-Neptunian? No no no. It should properly be classified as a Kuiper Belt Object. Right up there with other KBOs like Sedna, Quaoar, and the like. (And the name “plutino” is just stupid.)

  • They don’t make ’em like that anymore

    Okay, I’m a little behind on news, but I thought this story was extremely cool: Voyager 1 passes 100 AU from the sun. I guess this is only of interest to you if you’re a space and astronomy geek.

    (Some quick Wikipedia references: Voyager 1, AU.)

    It’s just amazing to me that a spacecraft built with 1970s technology has been able to go so far and outlast a lot of other junk that’s been introduced to the world since then. It’s currently the most distant man-made object from Earth. Signals from the spacecraft take more that 13 hours to reach us.

    The spacecraft [both Voyagers] are traveling at a distance where the sun is but a bright point of light and solar energy is not an option for electrical power. The Voyagers owe their longevity to their nuclear power sources, called radioisotope thermoelectric generators, provided by the Department of Energy.

    Voyager 1 is now at the outer edge of our solar system, in an area called the heliosheath, the zone where the sun’s influence wanes. This region is the outer layer of the ‘bubble’ surrounding the sun, and no one knows how big this bubble actually is. Voyager 1 is literally venturing into the great unknown and is approaching interstellar space. Traveling at a speed of about one million miles per day, Voyager 1 could cross into interstellar space within the next 10 years.

    Via Slashdot.

  • Killer Kangaroo!

    Now, this story is just silly: Fanged killer kangaroo roamed Outback.

    Forget cute, cuddly marsupials. A team of Australian palaeontologists say they have found the fossilized remains of a fanged killer kangaroo and what they describe as a “demon duck of doom”.
    …
    The species found at the dig had “well muscled-in teeth, not for grazing. These things had slicing crests that could have crunched through bone and sliced off flesh”, Hand said.

    I have this absurd image of saber-toothed kangaroos hopping around… Hey, maybe somebody will make a horror-thriller-scifi-Jurassic-Park type movie where killer kangaroos are brought back to life and terrorizing Australia! And if you can come up with a dumb enough name, Samuel L. Jackson will star in it!