Incredible Martian Landscapes

Incredible dunes on Mars, via The Bit Picture

I’ve selected two out of a dozen splendid images from Mars. Head on over to The Big Picture to see more! Some of them look like cells, but they were actually taken from space.

Polar Bears Have Black Skin

It's not white!

I didn’t know that polar bears have black skin. Kind of strange, since they live in a mostly white environment and their fur is white. It’s black so that it can soak up as much of the sun’s heat as possible. Actually, their fur is almost transparent.

Reflection of the sunlight from the densely packed transparent hairs makes polar bears seem to be white. The bears’ black skin absorbs heat from the sun. The seemingly-transparent fur is made up of hollow hairs called guard hairs. These air-filled guard hairs help transmit heat from the sunlight to the polar bear’s black skin as a solar heat collector. In turn, the reflection stops the heat being lost from their black skin.

The polar bear’s fur seems colourless and for many years, scientists worked on the theory that the individual hairs act as fiber optics bringing sunlight directly to the skin. This has recently been proven to be incorrect, and the hairs are not truly transparent, but contain keratin. Viewed side-on, the hairs appear colourless; viewed lengthwise (as if one was looking down a telescope) the hairs no longer appear transparent.

The Polar bear can swim in ice laden sea water quite comfortably. It is more in danger of hyperthermia (over-heating) then hypothermia (freezing).

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Is The Higgs Boson Trying To Sabotage The LHC?

Two physicists are speculating that the Higgs boson is trying to sabotage the Large Hadron Collider, by going back in time and messing it up so that the Higgs won’t be found. Sounds like science-fiction, but the researchers are quite serious.

The Making of a Physicist

A talk with physics Professor Emeritus Murray Gell-Mann about his life, research, and accomplishments.

Schrödinger’s Rapist

Schrödinger's rapist

The above xkcd comic prompted this post by Kate Harding. The 600+ comments on that thread prompted a guest post on Kate’s blog coining the term Schrödinger’s Rapist. That post has got about 1,000 comments.

A cat, along with a flask containing a poison, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not a mixture of alive and dead.

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Schrödinger’s cat isn’t a philosophical problem, but a thought experiment on quantum entanglement, since for the observer, the cat is simultaneously dead and alive. The term Schrödinger’s rapist applies to all men (or strangers) who approach women. These women consider all men as potential rapists, so-called Schrödinger’s rapists, men that are simultaneously rapists and are not rapists.

I was made aware of Kate’s site recently, I can’t remember the reason. The only reason why I came to this post was because of Belle de Jour’s post today.

Go ahead and THINK we look nice all you want. We do that too! This post is about what happens when you decide it’s a good idea to talk to that nice-looking woman.

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Meet Ardi Oldest Known Human Ancestor

Ardi's 4.4 million year old skeleton

This is kind of amazing news, since it’s supposed to eliminate the missing link theory from our evolution into modern humans. This means that the common ancestry between humans and apes is even further back, between 6 and 9 million years ago. Ardi walked upright, but used all four limbs when in trees.

Scientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor. The find reveals that our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago.

“This find is far more important than Lucy,” said Alan Walker, a paleontologist from Pennsylvania State University who was not part of the research. “It shows that the last common ancestor with chimps didn’t look like a chimp, or a human, or some funny thing in between.”

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(via kottke)

Empathy and Yawn Contagion

Primatologist Frans de Waal gives his opinion on empathy, and the lack of it. (via 3qd)

What is the Matter Gap?

What does it mean to cross the matter gap, or beyond the matter gap? Are we talking about non-baryonic matter, ie exotic matter, which could be a candidate for dark matter? Can something actually come from beyond the matter gap? What are the properties beyond the matter gap?

I’ve searched, but the most relevant thing that I could find is “filling the matter gap”, ie finding other types of matter, matter different from the baryonic matter that we know.

Kevin Kelly on Moore’s Law

Kevin Kelly writes an exhaustive examination of Moore’s Law.

Tyrannosaurus Rex is a Big Chicken

Wired examines facts and research on how T. Rex is a big chicken. After some rebuttals, bioinformatics started piecing the clues together while two researchers were in opposite camps.