Courtesy of University of Leicester

You know the moment. You're hanging out with a group of friends when one of the group, typically a guy, decides to do something dangerous. He jumps off a cliff into a river. He runs into a busy road for a real-life game of Frogger. He balances a loaded shotgun on his nose.

And just before he leaps into harms way he says with a smile: "Come on guys, this will be fun!" Then he leaps. The moment arrives.

The rest of the group watches him go, then, simultaneously, everone's eyes meet. Should we follow? This, folks, is what they call an evolutionary moment. This is where natural selection meets the pavement. And the key to survival?

Continue reading "How to avoid the Darwin Awards" »

Posted by Chris Emery at 5:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

The magnitude 7.9 earthquake that rocked much of China today, killing thousands, also sent tremors through the earth that caused water levels in a USGS monitoring well in Christiansburg, Va. to slosh more than a foot.

Here's the trace on the water level. (The smaller, wave-like variations before and after the big spike are caused by tidal forces in the ground - the action of lunar gravity on the Earth's crust as the planet spins.)

Posted by Frank Roylance at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

AP photo

A study in New England, published this month, found that teen-agers living in towns with strict smoking bans in restaurants were 40 percent less likely to become regular smokers than those in areas with no bans or weak ones.
 
 That’s not surprising, and you know why? Because kids want to do what looks cool. And I think one of the most uncool looking things is people congregated outside a building, puffing a way.

 You can say what you want about the fairness of indoor smoking bans.  But that kind of image, of people puffing away like outcasts outside an office, bar or restaurant, is probably doing more to discourage cigarette smoking than all the public service messages, broadcast and published over the past 10 years, combined.

 Whether you feel sorry for the people puffing away or not, it just LOOKS  terrible.

 There’s more on the study here.

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Credit: Associated Press

Here’s yet another fish story: it's about a species of squid that grows up to 46 feet long, dives down 6,500 feet and has never been seen in its natural habitat -- the deep oceans.
Scientists call this behemoth Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni. But what does everyone else call it?

The Colossal Squid.

Scientists at New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, are thawing the corpse of one of the largest  ever caught -- a 26 footer -- to examine its anatomy, remove its stomach, beak and other parts and submit tissue sample for DNA analysis, The Associated Press reports. The examination will be broadcast on the Internet and the museum plans to put it on display in an 1,800 gallon tank of formaldehyde.

Naturally, one of the first questions a reporter asks is what would it taste like.

No word on that, but the AP reports that calamari rings made from this monster would be the size of tractor tires. I’m not big on calamari myself, but some people seen to think it’s good.

You can thank your local Chilean sea bass for this example. Fisherman caught it accidentally in 2007 off Antarctica, where they were fishing for Chilean sea bass, which is the market-friendly name for Patagonian toothfish.

The fisherman froze it and eventually it was acquired by the museum.

You can read more about it here

If you want to watch the examination, its being broadcast on the Internet. But be advised, they haven’t started the work yet, so all you can see is a large black hunk of what looks like goo. The examination will eventually be posted here.

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

AP photo

A big decision in writing a newspaper story is what to "lead" with. The lead is the first sentence and it's supposed to draw readers in. There are a lot of possibilities with this one: a wire story about an aging penguin, missing its feathers, kept by the California Academy of Sciences at an aquarium in San Francisco. The 25-year-old was given a wet suit so it will go into the water.

The word-play possibilities here are enormous, right?  Not only is the penguin an aging alpha male, it's a species known as a Jackass Penguin, a moniker earned  because of the braying sounds they make.

Here are some other quirky things: the suit fastens with Velcro and a major concern was whether his peers would accept the new look. (They did). Since being fitted about six weeks ago, he's apparently gained weight, grown back some feathers and is as fiesty as ever. I'm open to suggestions for a lead here.

 For inspiration you may want to look here.

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

                                                                                 - Sun Photo by Jed Kirschbaum  

Now there's a debate that likely will never end. But it sure is lively, and fascinating.

The John Templeton Foundation recently invited 13 "prominent thinkers" to submit essays on the issue. The essays come from a broad range of writers, from the confidently atheistic, to the devoutly religious, from scientists to churchmen (and all but one of the authors are men).

You can take issue with any or all of them. But it makes for some thought-provoking, intriguing, and maybe exasperating, infuriating reading.

Are you willing to challenge yourself with ideas you may not (initially or ever) agree with? Do you have the confidence in your beliefs/convictions to take the time to read and consider other arguments?

Click here for the full collection.   Read, leave a comment, talk amongst yourselves.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Algerina Perna/Sun photo/2006

You might live longer if you didn’t have to worry about reproduction, or at least if you were sterile.

That’s the implication from research at Brown University.

Researchers there over-activated a gene that controls germline stem cells in fruit flies, essentially making them sterile.

They found the sterile flies lived 20 to 50 percent longer than typical flies. Other researchers found the same phenomenon 10 years ago in round worms.

For more than 50 years, scientists have suspected a link between reproduction and lifespan. The rule is that when organisms delay reproduction, they generally live longer.

And the recent work in flies by Thomas Flatt and Marc Tatar, suggests that signals from reproductive tissue directly control lifespan and metabolism, and that humans may be included in that equation, experts say.

The work appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and there’s more on it here.

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

                                                                     Two spiral galaxies in collision - Hubble/NASA 

Like two spinning saw blades slicing through each other, a pair of spiral galaxies collide in this Hubble image of an object called NGC 6050. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore has released 59 new images of galaxies in collision, part of a celebration today of the 18th anniverary of the orbiting observatory's launch.

Collectively titled "Galaxies Gone Wild," the photos constitute the largest collection of Hubble images ever released at one time by the Institute.

"Galaxies have a wild side. They have flirtatious close encounters that sometimes end in grand mergers and overflowing 'maternity wards' of new star birth as the colliding galaxies morph into wondrous new shapes," the institute said.

The variety of collisions documented in the images is amazing, as is the detail provided by Hubble's superior optics.

Astronomers estimate that only a couple of galaxies in a thousand are experiencing a collision as we see them in the night sky. But most, if not all of them, have likely undergone collisions or mergers in their past. In fact, scientists believe that's how the big galaxies we see today got started - through the merger of smaller clusters of stars and small galaxies going back to the earliest moments of the evolution of the universe.

The simple elliptical galaxies we see today are believed to be products of the mergers of graceful and complex spiral galaxies millions or billions of years ago.

Our own spiral Milky Way is no exception.  Baltimore astronomer Massimo Stiavelli said recent discoveries suggest that the Milky Way is currently digesting the stars of a small "dwarf" galaxy consumed not too long ago.

It was noticed when astronomers began measuring the movement of stars near the center of the galaxy - in the direction of the constellation Sagitarius. "When you measure very accurately the positions and motions of the stars," Stiavelli said, "there are some stars that move differently than the others, as if they are coming from another object."

The Magellanic Clouds - two small galaxies visible from the Southern Hemisphere - are close companions of the Milky Way. They are believed to be connected to our galaxy by a slender stream of gas, perhaps drawn away under the gravitational influence of the Milky Way. It's not exactly a collision, but it is certainly a gravitational interaction.

And in time, astronomers say, the grand spiral Andromeda Galaxy - another relatively close companion of the Milky Way, is expected to collide and merge with it.

Happily for anyone alive in that time, these collisions are not as violent as it might seem. The stars in a galaxy may be connected by gravity, but they are actually very far apart. In a "collision," virtually all of them will pass by each other without actually crashing.

And the time scales of these events - 10s to 100s of millions of years - are so vast that no individual living thing would see any movement.

Continue reading "Galaxies in collision; a new Hubble spectacular" »

Posted by Frank Roylance at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
                    

Disappearing rings? What's this guy talking about? People have been entranced by Saturn's glorious ring system since Galileo first spotted them in 1610.

His telescope wasn't very strong, so the rings looked like ears, or jug handles to him. But the advent of better telescopes brought the complex, and ultra-thin ring planes into clearer view. And no one who sees them through a good telescope ever forgets his/her first view.

Saturn and its halo are an image you've seen since childhood - an icon representing all of outer space. Here's an amazing Hubble movie of Saturn rotating inside of its rings.

But the magic of celestial mechanics periodically makes the rings vanish, as the Earth passes through the ring system's plane twice during each of Saturn's 29-year orbits around the sun. That brings them into an edge-on perspective with respect to Earth. Like a dinner plate, the rings may present a broad expanse to our eyes when the angle is steep. But tilt it back to edge-on, and the dinner plate becomes a thin line.

In Saturn's case the rings are so thin they virtually disappear. Two years after Galileo discovered them, the rings "vanished." He was baffled.

And that's where we're headed now. Saturn is visible on any clear evening this spring, high overhead in the constellation Leo. By April 30, our view of Saturn's rings will show them at an angle of just under 10 degrees from edge-on. And that will be our last, best view of the ring system for the next several years.

The last time this happened was in 1995 and 1996, when the ring angle shrank to zero. Then it began to increase again, reaching a maximum of 27 degrees in 2003, a climax that occurs about every 14 years. It's been diminishing ever since, and slips to zero degrees again in September 2009.

Here's how the 1995-96 event looked to Hubble.

Posted by Frank Roylance at 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
                    

Credit: Los Angeles Times 

The Transportation Safety Administration is now randomly conducting full body scans of passengers boarding planes at LAX, and plans to expand it to other airports.

The technology, called millimeter wave imaging, uses radio waves to create an image based on the body's energy -- resulting in a fuzzy 3D image in white and gray that shows how the person looks without clothing, according to the Los Angeles Times.

TSA plans to buy at least 30 more imagers and use them at airports around the country as part of a pilot program. 

Posted by Dennis O'Brien at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)