Around 40 years ago, astronomers became aware that our galaxy, the Milky Way, was moving through space at a much faster rate than expected. At 2.2m kmh, the speed of the Milky Way through the cosmos is 2500x faster than a cruising airliner; 55x more than the escape velocity from Earth; and a factor of 2 greater than even the galaxy’s own escape velocity! But where this motion comes from is a mystery. Net motion can arise from nearby clumps in the distribution of matter, like a massive cluster of galaxies. The additional gravitational attraction of such a galaxy cluster can slow down, and even reverse, the expansion of the universe in its immediate vicinity. But no such cluster is obvious in the direction of the Milky Way’s motion. There is an excess of galaxies in the general vicinity, and an excess of radiation visible in X-ray telescopes. But nothing that in any way seems large enough to explain the results.
Tag: science
Microbial genome engineering
this looks like a very interesting talk:
Dr. Wang will discuss advances in microbial genome engineering that enable rapid reprogramming of bacteria in the gut and the skin. This enables novel probiotics to fight diseases and future augmentation of human physiological function
No Little Ice Age
Our results suggest that the existing consensus over a Little Ice Age in Europe is a statistical artifact, where the standard climatological practice of smoothing what turn out to be random data prior to analysis gives the spurious appearance of irregular oscillations. This is an example of the ‘Slutsky effect’ where filtering of purely random variations can produce spurious cycles
New Class of Dyson Sphere
Any civilization that evolves during its sun’s main sequence and then finds a way to survive the red giant and supernova stages, will also probably find a way to create a Dyson sphere around the surviving white dwarf. For that reason, these stars may be more likely to host such a structure.
What’s more, a white dwarf is a better host for a Dyson sphere. The habitable zone around a white dwarf is closer to the star, so such a sphere would be smaller. A 1-meter-thick sphere built in the habitable zone around a white dwarf would require some 10^23 kilograms of matter, just a little less than the mass of our moon.
Did Neurons Evolve 2x?
On the one hand, 2 independent origins of neurons would be surprising because it seems unlikely that the precise sequence of genetic accidents that created neurons could happen more than once. But it also seems unlikely that sponges would lose something as valuable as a neuron. “The only example we know from bilaterians where the nervous system was lost completely is in parasites”
Arabic ring in Viking grave
the 13th warrior is real
A finger ring discovered in Birka in the grave of a woman dating to around 850 A.D is the only ring with an Arabic inscription ever found at a Scandinavian archaeological site.
The Brain Hates Slowpokes
In the 2000s, psychologist Richard Wiseman found worldwide walking speeds had gone up by 10%.
The pace of our lives is linked to culture. Researchers have shown society’s accelerating pace is shredding our patience. In tests, psychologists and economists have asked subjects if they would prefer a little bit of something now or a lot of it later; say, $10 today versus $100 in a year, or 2 pieces of food now versus 6 pieces in 10 seconds.
Subjects—both human and other animals—often go for the now, even when it’s not optimal. 1 study showed that exposing people to “the ultimate symbols of impatience culture”—fast-food symbols like McDonald’s golden arches—increases their reading speed and preference for time-saving products, and makes them more likely to opt for small rewards now over larger ones later.
Our rejection of slowness is especially apparent when it comes to technology. “Everything is so efficient nowadays,. We’re less and less able to wait patiently.” We now practically insist that Web pages load in a 0.25 seconds, when we had no problem with 2 seconds in 2009 and 4 seconds in 2006. As of 2012, videos that didn’t load in 2 seconds had little hope of going viral.
Automated synthesis
Towards a much more automated organic chemistry, a series of articles by Derek Lowe.
MIDA complexes have an unusual property: they stick to silica, even when eluted with MeOH/ether. But THF moves them right off. This trick allows something very useful indeed. It’s a universal catch-and-release for organic intermediates. And that, as the paper shows, opens the door to a lot of automated synthesis. The idea, the hope, is that if the field does become modular and mechanized, that it frees us up to do things that we couldn’t do before. Think about biomolecules: if peptides and oligonucleotides still had to be synthesized as if they were huge natural products, by human-wave-attack teams of day-and-night grad students, how far do you think biology would have gotten by now? Synthesizing such things was Nobel-worthy at first, then worth a PhD all by themselves, but now it’s a routine part of everyday work. Organic synthesis is heading down the exact same road
End of synthesis? You must be joking. This is not even close. As I tried (ineffectively) to make clear yesterday, I don’t think that this particular paper is The End. But it’s the first thing I’ve seen that makes me think that there is an end to a lot of traditional organic chemistry.
No software is yet producing “Whoa, look at that” syntheses. But let’s be honest: most humans aren’t, either. The upper reaches of organic synthesis can still produce such things – and the upper stratum of organic chemists can still produce new and starting routes even to less complex molecules. But seeing machine-generated synthesis coming along in its present form just serves to point out that it’s not so much that the machines are encroaching onto human territory, so much as pointing out that some of the human work has gradually become more mechanical.
Milky Way grows 50%
the Milky Way isn’t just a disk of stars in a flat plane–it’s corrugated, extending the known width of the Milky Way from 100K light years across to 150K light years
Strange attractor stars
It meant that the blinking of KIC 5520878 wasn’t an extraterrestrial signal, Ditto realized, but something else that had never before been found in nature: a mathematical curiosity caught halfway between order and chaos called a “strange nonchaotic attractor.” it might be the fate of unstable stars to evolve until they arrive at a number like the golden mean. “It’s the most robust number to perturbations, which means these stars may select it out”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 