If that’s not their tagline already, it should be.
Anyone know when Sheldon is scheduled for a time slice?
It’s basically just a series of tubes.
As are our neurons, if you want to look at it that way.
Both are still awesome.
It boggles the mind how huge it really is. You always see some part and think, “That’s pretty big.”
Then you realize that that “big” thing is just a tiny, tiny, tiny part of the whole thing.
'Chameleon colours ‘switched by crystals’:
Swiss researchers have discovered how chameleons accomplish their vivid colour changes: they rearrange the crystals inside specialised skin cells.
It was previously suggested that the reptiles’ famous ability came from gathering or dispersing coloured pigments inside different skin cells.
But the new results put it down to a “selective mirror” made of crystals.
They also reveal a second layer of these cells that reflect infrared light and may help keep the animals cool.
Reptiles make colours in two ways: they have cells full of pigment for warm or dark colours, but brighter blues and whites come from light bouncing off physical elements like these crystals: so-called “structural colours”.
I think this is ‘science’ related enough for here?
'Anthropocene: New dates proposed for the ‘Age of Man’:
The Anthropocene - a new geological time period that marks the “Age of man” - began in 1610, a study suggests. Scientists believe that the arrival of Europeans in the Americas had an unprecedented impact on the planet, marking the dawn of this new epoch.
The findings are published in the journal Nature.
Others say that the industrial revolution or the first nuclear tests better signal the start of the Anthropocene. While some believe the exact date for a new epoch can only be determined with the benefit of thousands or even millions of years of hindsight.
An international Anthropocene Working Group is currently reviewing the evidence and will announce its favoured start date next year.
I can see the arrival in the New World as being a catalyst to the industrial revolution, so i’m not against the idea of this earlier start period.
I’m not sure on geological timescales it makes sense to have both a holocene and an anthropocene era - would the holocene even be perceptible in the geological record in future if it only lasts ca 11000 years? And certainly humans have been causing extinctions since the start of the holocene, if not before.
Tony Stark delivers a bionic arm to a 7-year-old.
Eh, humans had a big effect on the world prior to 1610. Sounds like an excuse to blame everything on white people to me.
Once a species started making complex tools and especially building cities the game changed for everything that wasn’t one of them.
Well 1610 is a push prior to the industrial revolution (when the original idea for this new epoch in human history was to start, leading to current man made climate change etc) to i guess cover the first steps towards that moment. It did change the way me interacted with the world and the human population (started the slave trade etc). I wasn’t sure about it at first, but the more i think on it the more i can see it leading to the industrial revolution (the cotton mills because of all the slave tended cotton stateside etc) and the issues we now have to deal with.
And white people have a lot to answer for imho (as a white person).
I’m not sure what to think on this just yet, interesting for sure:
‘Circular thinking: Stonehenge’s origin is subject of new theory’:
Whether it was a Druid temple, an astronomical calendar or a centre for healing, the mystery of Stonehenge has long been a source of speculation and debate. Now a dramatic new theory suggests that the prehistoric monument was in fact “an ancient Mecca on stilts”.
The megaliths would not have been used for ceremonies at ground level, but would instead have supported a circular wooden platform on which ceremonies were performed to the rotating heavens, the theory suggests.
Julian Spalding, an art critic and former director of some of the UK’s leading museums, argues that the stones were foundations for a vast platform, long since lost – “a great altar” raised up high towards the heavens and able to support the weight of hundreds of worshippers.
For some reason i see an Ewok village?
Jub Jub, I’m a druid, yo.
10/10 Excellent.
Anti-AI/robot protest at SXSW, reportedly led by a “computer engineer” from UT. Because the Butlerian Jihad is next.
'Dancing in the dark: The search for the ‘missing Universe’:
They say the hardest pieces of music to perform are often the simplest ones. And so it is with science - straightforward questions like “what is the Universe made from?” have so far defeated the brightest minds in physics.
Until - perhaps - now. Next week, the Large Hadron Collider at Cern will be fired up again after a two-year programme of maintenance and upgrading.
When it is, the energy with which it smashes particles will be twice what it was during the LHC’s Higgs boson-discovering glory days.
It is anticipated - hoped, even - that this increased capability might finally reveal the identity of “dark matter” - an invisible but critical entity that makes up about a quarter of the Universe.
This is the topic of this week’s Horizon programme on BBC Two.
Dark matter arrived on most scientists’ radar in 1974 thanks to the observations of American astronomer Vera Rubin, who noticed that stars orbiting the gravity-providing black holes at the centre of spiral galaxies like ours did so at the same speed regardless of their distance from the centre.
This shouldn’t happen - and doesn’t happen in apparently comparable systems like our Solar System, where planets trapped by the gravity of the sun orbit increasingly slowly the further away they find themselves. Neptune takes 165 Earth years to plod around the Sun just once.
This is what our understanding of gravity tells us should happen.
Vera’s stars racing around at the same speed were a surprise: there had to be more stuff there - providing more gravity - than we could see. Dark matter.
Dark matter, then, is a generic term for the stuff (matter) that must be there but which we can’t see (dark). But as to what this dark matter might actually be, so far science has drawn a blank.
That’s not to say that there’s been no progress at all. It’s now thought that dark matter isn’t just ordinary stuff in the form of gas and dust and dead stars that are dark simply because they don’t shine. It’s now generally agreed that the dark matter is a miasma of (as yet unidentified) fundamental particles like (but not) the quarks and gluons, and so on, that make up the atoms with which we’re more familiar.
These “dark” fundamental particles are known as Wimps: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. This acronym, like the term “dark matter” itself, is a description of how these theoretical dark matter creatures behave, rather than a definition of what they are: The “weakly interacting” bit means that they don’t have much to do with ordinary matter. They fly straight though it. This makes them very tricky to detect, given that ordinary matter is all we have to detect them with.
This is the topic of this week’s Horizon programme on BBC Two.
Is it possible to watch this in/from the US?
maybe? If it isn’t easy via the BBC site (Horizon site even?) try looking for it on youtube, as quite a few things make it there, and if not then you can try the dark arts of tricking the BBC into thinking you are based in the uk (via a uk based proxy etc), although that is not easy to do i understand.
Ah! They did put it on youtube.
If they’re putting it on youtube, why the “UK only” BBC iPlayer thing? - oh well, doesn’t matter, does it?
Cool, get it while it is hot. I use a browser add-on for downloading youtube videos to keep, that way you keep a copy so when it is not on youtube anymore you won’t mind. As for the why of it, good question. There are those of us (BBC license payers) that are happy that our contribution can be enjoyed by anyone, from anywhere, and then there are those corporate lawyer types that want everyones money all the time. So i think those two forces clash and cause this kind of issue.
The BBC are generally good about things where they own the rights, but they can’t open iPlayer up to everyone because of licensing rights.