Fast as lightning

When you watch this video you'll see that 'fast as lightning' is hardly an exagerration - in fact it's practically an understatement. To trace the course of lightning, this slow-motion video, massively expanded to 1.33 minutes, was shot at a speed of 9,000 frames per second in Rapid City, SD on 16 June 2010.

Via Neatorama

The Adidas 'jabulani' ball proved a real balls-up

In case you thought your eyes were deceiving you when the ball seemed to swerve unexpectedly just milliseconds away from the goalposts in several of this year's games, watch NASA's own tests on the highly controversial so-called 'jabulani' ball that Adidas designed especially for the 2010 World Cup, in the name of God knows what interests. Countless football players, goalkeepers, and team managers have already complained about it, and quite rightly too. Here's what NASA aerospace engineer Rabi Mehta found out about the jabulani ball:

"From his research on tennis and cricket balls in wind tunnels, Mehta believes that the Jabulani ball will tend to knuckle at 45 to 50 mph, which coincides with the speed of the ball during free-kick around the goal area. Another point made by Mehta, is that a lot of the stadiums for the World Cup are located at high altitude (Johannesburg is at 5,500 feet) and this will affect the ball aerodynamics as well, since the air density is lower. At this high altitude, the ball will tend to fly faster (less drag) and swerve less (less lift)."

The short video below demonstrates Mehta's points and explains the causes of the ball's faulty aerodynamics:

What gravity looks like

You're looking at a colourful portrait of the planet as a continuous gravity field. The map, which depicts (in false colour) the pull of gravity across the Earth, has been compiled on the basis of data collected by Europe's low-orbiting Goce satellite. The precise effects of gravity on the planet are of great interest not only to geophysicists and engineers, but also to oceanographers and environmental scientists. Read why here.

Image from the BBC (click to enlarge).

Aurora from space

Satellite images of the ghostly beauty of the Southern and Northern lights.

 Aurora Australis (NASA)

Aurora Australis (NASA)

Aurora Borealis over the US (SSEC)

Sub-atomic sounds

Many years after Blondie's 'Atomic', here's CERN's 'sub-atomic': here you can listen to the simulated sounds produced by sub-atomic particles, the most famous of which is the ever-elusive Higgs boson, aka 'God particle', when they are generated in the Large Hadron Collider. There's a definite sci-fi feel about the littlw tune, I must say. More about the project on the BBC.

The image represents the electronic signatures produced by collisions of protons and antiprotons in the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab (image via Science Daily, courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory).

Vile vuvuzelas

All you ever wanted to know (and probably more) about vuvuzelas, and why you should count yourself lucky if you're watching this year's World Cup games from the comfort of your home, rather than out there where it's at. A single vuvuzela produces 116 decibels at 1 metre. Need I say more? (Perhaps I do: prolonged exposure to its sound can really mess up your hearing.)

 Image source

Chemistry matters

Oxygen from Christopher Hendryx on Vimeo

(spotted on Neatorama).

Love at first sight

Now this is what I call love at first sight. Not naughty love, not romantic love, just the huge joy of finding a kindred spirit - even if not of a kindred species. And yet, when I watch this I can't help thinking that there must be some special affinity between primates and dogs. It made my day.

Source: National Geographic

That is simple my friend: because politics is more difficult than genetics.

With headlines like 'Immaculate creation' (New Scientist) and 'Church warns scientists not to play God' (Guardian) you would be excused for thinking it's the Creation all over again; forbidden knowledge, temptation, Evil and all.

To be fair, Craig Venter and his team have not quite played God. They took the DNA blueprint of an existing organism (Mycoplasma mycoides, a bacterium that's a goat pathogen), an existing cell of another organism (a related bacterium), and assembled a brand new organism out of the two. More precisely, Dr. Venter's team joined small stretches of the pathogen's DNA to create a copy of its complete genome, and inserted that in the empty shell of a cell, i.e. the cadaver of a cell from which its own DNA had been removed. And thus, the first synthetic cell ever was born.

Image source: Science Daily

Dr Venter himself has been quick to boost positive publicity for his Frankenstein cell: think of microorganisms tailor-made to produce biofuel or vaccines, to clean up the sea, to bind CO2, all on demand. Amazing potential indeed. But think also cells tinkered with to spread bespoke diseases for which no cure exists, and in the long term, think man-made organisms with unpredictable consequences on the environment and the diversity of life itself.

 Mycoplasma mycoides. Image source.

Philosophical questions aside, the danger of bioterrorism and bioweapons of mass destruction, but not as we know them, is no science fiction - and what we know is horrific enough as it is. Dr Venter's breakthrough is enormous, and, as is always the case with knowledge, irreversible. In that sense, it is indeed the Creation all over again: vast potential for immense good and immense evil has just been released unto the world, perhaps for better, quite likely for worse, whether deliberately or inadvertently. There's 'bioerror and bioterror', points out Harvard geneticist George Church (Nature).

The experience of millennia ought to have taught us that anything that can be used as a tool can be used as a weapon, and it's up to us to try our damnest to prevent the latter. We've been there before with nuclear power, haven't we. Hiroshima and Nagashaki are a reminder that it isn't just nasty bioterrorists and rogue governments that apply science to devastate. Creating synthetic life is not unethical in my view; creating something whose potential for harm is as enormous as its potential for good, and not putting as much effort into ensuring that it cannot be abused as what you put into the research - that's what's unethical.

Interviewing Albert Einstein, a New York Times journalist asked how come people were able to discover atomic power but not the means to control it. 'That is simple my friend,' Einstein replied. 'Because politics is more difficult than physics.' And than genetics, as it happens.

(Image of DNA double helix from Science Daily. Reports from the BBC, the New Scientist, Nature journal)

The body-transfer illusion

The video on the body-transfer illusion is short, but the implications will probably stay with you a lot longer, especially if you're on (and into) Second Life, or heavily into avatars. As the New Scientist article which accompanies the video notes, 'previous studies found that giving people virtual-reality avatars that are taller or shorter than they are alters the way they behave.'

Clearly, experimenting with a couple of inches more or less is probably just one of the countless, and not necessarily as benign, ramifications of body-transfer illusions. Think fabricated Facebook selves befriending strangers, perhaps even other fabricated selves; think blurring the boundaries between the real self and the virtual one; think also something much more old-fashioned: weeping over your pop-corn while watching tear-jerkers, and ducking under your seat as hordes of ogres march against the temporarily helpless hero that you so empathise with. And then think that the correlation between make-believe selves and behaviour is not exactly news to the media movers, shakers, and trend-setters; or to advertisers, for that matter. The body-transfer illusion sounds like the 3-D version of something as old as human imagination.

War: a monkey business

Social dynamics, rather than immediate competition for resources, seem to be central to the choice between engaging in war or remaining at peace with rivals. What's more, 'previous conflicts shape future decisions' on the choice between war and peace. Engaging in conflict may aim at preventing a rival from gaining too much dominance, or defending a potential ally. In the long run, however, strategies of conflict and peace are indeed linked to 'the fight for status and the access to resources that status brings'.

Sound familiar? Sound pretty obvious, even? The finding comes from a study by Jessica Flack and colleagues Simon DeDeo and David Krakauer, who collected and analysed data from 160 days of field observations of a group of 84 monkeys. Instead of starting out with assumptions and hypotheses about why and when the monkeys get involved in fights, Flac and her team decided to collect data on a group of pigtailed macaques at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Lawrenceville, Georgia, and see what patterns emerge.

Clearly, in humans the decision to fight is also shaped by moral and emotional choices, and it would be unhelpful, not to say dangerous, to reduce such decisions to a genetic predisposition beyond moral and rational control. All the same, the study will hopefully provide some insights into what shapes human conflicts (source: New Scientist).

 Image source

Under 6 or more than 9 hours of sleep per night can be bad for you

Too little or too much of a good thing can be bad for you, and that includes sleep. Getting less than six or over nine hours of sleep per night is bad news for your longevity. This is the verdict of a joint UK and Italian research project, which pools the results of 16 previous studies, based on a total of 1.5 million people from the UK, the US and various European and East Asian countries.


The joint study found that people who regularly sleep less than 6 hours a night have a 12% higher chance of dying over a 25-year period than those who slept regularly for 6 to 8 hours a night. At the same time, compared to that group of  'ideal' sleepers, the odds for a longer life are worse people who sleep often more than 9 hours a night. The latter may not be directly linked to premature death but merely be a marker of ill health, i.e. it may be a symptom of some other underlying health problem directly linked to premature death. The degree to which too little sleep and the decrease in longevity is causally linked is not clear either. It may be that sleep-starved people are more prone to accidents or habits that harm health.

Full article in the BBC.

Image source

The colours of Siberia

Noril'sk, Northeast Siberia. This false-color image shows data collected by Landsat 7’s Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) instrument on August 9, 2001. Source: NASA

Dinosaurs came out and went extinct

Image spotted on Titam (I do hope the lady in the picture is joking).

There you go, mystery solved. It wasn't the humongous asteroid (or small comet) which, 65 million years ago blasted the enormous crater at Chicxulub, in Yucatan, Mexico, and dinosaurs, as well as numerous other species, out of existence with the force of more than a billion A-bombs. It was same-sex hanky panky that killed off the dinosaurs.

Or else, the Flood. In fact, I'm really torn between the gay-dinosaur extinction theory and the creationist theory that since only a pair of young dinos could have gone aboard Noah's Ark, the rest just drowned, about 4,300 years ago. In the prime of their evolution too: they'd only been around for 1,700 years up to that point, having been created on Day 6 by the Lord. Not only that, but T. Rex was a veggie, I'll have you know; it says so in the Bible.

Oh, and pigs fly, by the way (although the Bible omits that fact, I believe).

The mass disappearance of honeybees: an eco-whodunnit

The massive decline in the global honeybee population has been declared a catastrophe. Bees contribute more than £26 billion (about €30 billion or $40 billion) to the global economy and an inestimable – and invaluable – degree of variety to what we eat and wear: about 90% of all commercial crops alone depend on honeybees for pollination. All sorts of fruit, vegetables, as well as coffee, cattle feed (there goes your burger), and cotton (there go you knickers) could become exorbitantly expensive or, in a worst-case scenario, practically disappear, if there aren’t enough bees around to pollinate them.

Image source

The current-case scenario is bad enough, and something of an eco-whodunnit: although last year both in the US and in parts of Europe the number of professionally managed honey-bee colonies declined by at least 30% what exactly causes the disappearance of bees and, in many cases, how they disappear remains a puzzle. Many beekeepers report that they simply find the hives empty. Trying to solve the mystery of a murder without a body is notoriously difficult, and in the case of mass bee disappearances the culprit has yet to be identified. Potential suspects include pesticides, harsh winters, rainy summers, an array of parasites, bacteria, and viruses, as well as the decline in the numbers of trained beekeepers, and the often poor practices of amateur beekeepers.

In the US, the presence of 121 different pesticides found in samples of bees, pollen, and beeswax is a strong indication that the irresponsible use of pesticides, which, apparently, farmers often tend to mix into lethal cocktails, is likely to be a key cause for the mass disappearance of bees.

Medieval beekeepers. Details unknown (image source).

Meanwhile, while Europe and the US are facing a potentially acute agrarian crisis, the number of honey-bee colonies worldwide has increased by around 45% over the last 50 years, according to the FAO. Not that this is much good to either Europe or the US. What’s more, if pesticides and infection are indeed what kills bees, it’s only a matter of time before the problem spreads elsewhere. In Japan, where bee imports were banned in an effort to prevent the spread of infections, bee theft is on the increase. In 2009 alone, more than two million honey-bees were stolen, and a swarm now fetches more than £260 (€300 or $400).

 Image source

Facts and figures from Science Daily, the BBC, and the Guardian.

A fair voting system? The odds don't sum up

Chaos connoisseur Ian Stewart (Warwick university) explains in the New Scientist why a voting system that truly and fairly represents the electorate's choices is something of a mathematical unicorn. The UK, which will be voting in the general election on 6 May, uses the first-past-the-post or "plurality" voting system, along with (among others) the US, Canada, and India.

The first-past-the-post system, as mathematician Donald Saari (University of California) has demonstrated, favours the party that has even the slightest edge over its opponents in most electoral divisions, even if overall, i.e. when the results of all electoral divisions are taken into account, that party does not collect the majority of the votes. Sounds like a conundrum?

In fact, it's a question of reasonably simple arithmetic. And because it looks convincingly fair, even though it doesn't pass the litmus test of maths, it's frequently used. This systems is especially favourable to likely losers in touch-and-go elections, a notable example being the 2000 US presidential election, which G. W. Bush won by a slim margin over Al Gore.

Here's how it works: suppose that you ask 15 voters to rank their preference for milk (M), beer (B) and wine (W). Say that the ranking looks like this:
        M-W-B: 6 people
        B-W-M: 5 people
        W-B-M: 4 people
According to the first-past-the post system, milk is the clear winner, while wine is the clear loser. In fact, 10 of the 15 voters would much rather drink wine (first and third sets) than beer, while 9 out of 15 rank wine above milk (second and third sets). Wine, not milk, is what these people really want (understandably too), except that the plurality system exploits the fact that alcohol drinkers almost inevitably will name their favourite booze as their first choice, and the closest alternative as their second choice (see second and third pairs). 'Similar things happen in politics', points out Ian Stewart, 'when two parties appeal to the same kind of voters, splitting their votes between them and allowing a third party unpopular with the majority to win the election.'

As you'd expect, the exploitable quirks of voting maths have not got lost on politicians. You've probably known this intuitively all along but Saari's calculations provide mathematical proof: 'given a set of voter preferences you can design a system that produces any result you desire'.

The potion that makes 'men just as empathetic as women'.

Not my words, mind. "'Cuddle hormone' makes men more empathetic" reports the BBC. According to a team of German and UK researchers, a nasal spray containing the hormone oxytocin can make men more 'in tune with other people's feelings'. Inhaling the spray 'made men just as empathetic as women'.

The team are optimistic that the 'cuddle-hormone' therapy could prove beneficial for men with behavioural problems, but I suspect that the market for this empathy potion will prove much larger than suggested. Plenty of frustrated women out there...

 

The Alien Within

Projection, as Carl Jung defined it, is loosely understood as the unconscious, i.e. unintentional transfer of subjective ideas and emotions onto someone else - 'an outer object': when we 'project', we attribute to others motives they may not have or emotions they may not be experiencing. Most likely, those projected motives and emotions reflect what we've learned to expect from others, and our own motives and emotions.

In that sense, Professor Hawking's warning against seeking contact with aliens seems like a perfect example of species-wide projection: "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet" warned Professor Hawking alien enthusiasts (BBC). In his view, while it's perfectly rational to assume that intelligent life must have evolved, and exist as we speak, on other planets, alien visitors might well turn out to be ruthless space conquistadors.

 The German poster for War of the Worlds (1953), based on H.G. Wells's novel.

Stephen Hawking definitely has a point so far as 'we' and the way we've developed are concerned. And he may well turn out to have a point about those so far hypothetical aliens: as Jung stressed, 'projection' is not an arbitrary delusion. Very seldom is what we project all in our mind. Usually, there's at least a small element of what we attribute to another person actually there, except that we tend to blow it out of all proportion - and act accordingly.

Which makes Professor Hawking's argument against seeking contact with aliens all the more persuasive: even if alien visitors are not predatory conquerors, since that's what our species has learned to expect from its infancy, we're likely to treat them as such, and rush to apply the Bush Doctrine onto an intergalactic scale. That'd be fun.

 Image: Stray Snippets

Organic typography

Each year, the Creative Review runs a competition for the cover of its May Annual issue, which has to feature the capital letter 'A'. This year's winner is Craig Ward, who clearly has an interest in live culture: Craig's idea grew, well, in a culture dish, out of pollen cells, with the help of immunologist Frank Conrad (University of Colorado, Denver). More on the project in the Creative Review's article.

Spark of life

Whenever I happened to watch some B (or C, or D) movie in which volcanic wrath formed the perfect background to uncanny, sinister events, I remember attributing the momentous bolts of lightning to rather OTT special effects. Eyjafjallajökull's spectacular fireworks, however, have reminded me that, in fact, lightning is a common phenomenon accompanying volcanic eruptions, so I decided to investigate: 'lightning bolts in the hot dust and gas plumes of exploding volcanoes may have seeded the ancient Earth with one of the essential ingredients for life', suggested the New Scientist.

What happens is that lightning splits carbon dioxide molecules, and the ensuing reaction between oxygen atoms and nitrogen forms nitric oxide.

Now, although fairly simple, nitric acid (NO), is something of a star molecule, and in 1992 was proclaimed 'Molecule of the Year' because of its regulating role in many cellular functions. The high point of its career, however, seems to have come soon after the Earth became stable enough for life to evolve.

Way before the Jurassic Park era, when the Earth was young - and terribly acned with carbuncular volcanoes - nitric acid, which was produced also by lightning, shielded primitive microorganisms from the toxic effects of ozone, of which there was plenty in the atmosphere. And so the primitive microorganisms survived and grew more sophisticated, and, well, here we are.

(More in Science Direct. Below, lightning illuminates the sky around Eyjafjallajökull)

Image source: the Telegraph