Scottish Nous

Microorganism Responsible For The Plauge of Athens Fingered

Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi.  Typhoid fever.   [Hat tip to Diana Mertz Hsieh]

Time Travel Made Simple

Researchers at ANU have apparently slowed light to a few hundred meters per second (that's down from three hundred million meters per second, if you're counting).  Who thinks you can go back in time if you go faster than a few hundred meters per second?  From 666 ABC Canberra.

Krubera Cave

Click this map of Krubera Cave to virtually spelunk it.  It's currently the deepest known cave in the world.  I wish I had something like this in my back yard!  National Geographic has a subscriber only article on spelunking the cave to a depth of over 2000m (about 170m above sea level), but Speleogenesis has information on the expedition for free.  It's time to go caving.

Relativity is of the Devil

Despite my recent tirade, politics is  not limited to the government:

In 11 different years, Einstein was nominated only to be rejected. One Nobel committee member wrote Einstein must never receive a Nobel Prize even if the entire world demands it. The entire world did demand it, and Einstein got the 1921 Nobel — for his contributions to physics and for his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect. He showed that light behaves not only as a wave but also as a stream of particles, or quanta. The committe directed Einstein not to mention relativity in his acceptance lecture [emphasis added]. He did so anyway. — Heidi Schultz

That's an excerpt from the May 2005 issue of National Geographic.  [Via Mises]

Please... Think of the Kittens

To the chagin of prurient children everywhere, scientists have discovered that the sexually frigid relative who insisted that masturbation engenders blindness was right.  See New Scientist for the details, as the Aug. 2005 issue of Psychonomic Bulletin and Review isn't yet available online.  If you've been masturbating too much, there is still a dim ray of hope.  Find some dirt, add a large dose of saliva to the dirt and mix well, carefully plaster the mud over your eyes, and then travel to Jerusalem to wash the mud off in the Pool of Siloam.  If aiport security attempts to stop your stumbling person from boarding your flight, be sure to begin your explanation by pointing out that you masturbated too much and...

Your Future Masters...

... are being created in Ishikawa Namiki Komuro's laboratory.  Watch high speed robotic arms dribble ping pong balls, track and bat baseballs, and steal items from researchers, and catch objects moving at 80 mph with pinpoint accuracy.  This robot is watching you.  The age of clumsy robots is ending fast.

Pity The Manakins

Now this is cruel.  (Use BugMeNot or get the Firefox  extension to fill in free registration forms automatically.)  The male club-winged manakin shakes its wings twice as fast as a hummingbird to  produce a violin-like sound.  Dr. Bostwick has hypothesized that barbs or ridges on one wing moving against a smoother adjacent wing gives rise to the sound the club-winged manakins use to - duh! - attract mates.  Now for the real cruelty:

On her next trip to Ecuador, Dr. Bostwick hopes to catch a male club-winged manakin and clip off the raking tip on each wing (a harmless procedure).  "I should be able to completely silence the bird," she predicted.

This is roughly the equivalent of castration.   Don't you pity the poor little bird that finds itself in Dr. Bostwick's clutches as she coldly prepares to carry out the harsh procedure demanded by  modern science?  She might as well just put him out of his misery when she's done with him, since he'll never be able to return to the forests and eloquently express himself to members of the female sex again.  Helplessly struggling to make a noise, he'll flap his wings faster and faster in desperation until...  Oh the horrors!

Psuedo-Copulatory Lizards and Digenetic Trematodes

The sheep liver fluke, a digenetic trematode, is a parasite whose life-cycle takes it through three - count three! - hosts.  This particular fluke, Fasciola hepatica, reaches sexual maturity in the liver of sheep, laying eggs which are passed in the fecal matter to snails.  Asexual reproduction occurs in the snail, accompanied by irritation of the snail's salivary glands, and the asexually produced offspring (cercariae) are secreted in salivic slime-balls which ants apparently find very tasty.  Upon ingestion by an ant, most, but not all, of the cercariae migrate into the blood-filled hemocoel of the ant where they remain in temporary hibernation.  Those cercariae not capable of reaching sexual maturity, however, migrate into the esophageal region of the ant.  A temperature based ant behavior-modification mechanism takes over, resulting in evening lock-jaw.  If all goes well, this evening lock-jaw occurs while the ant is happily feasting upon a blade of grass.  The ant remains stuck until the morning sun warms him up, making him easy prey for grazing sheep.  The remaining cercariae in the ingested ant turn into little worms which travel through the intenstine, into the liver, and finally to their home in the sheep's bile ducts where they reach sexual maturity and repeat the process.  This fascinating scientific excursion was prompted by the pseusdo-copulatory behavior of Cnemidophorus uniparens, an all-female species of lizard that has no (obvious) need for bumping genitalia, as recounted in The Golem: What You Should Know about Science by Collins and Pinch.  (The relation?  One benefit of sexual reproduction is parasite resistance.)

Ten Percent

The 100-mile long iceberg B15A creates its own weather patterns and contains enough water to keep the Nile river running for 80 years.  You can get video here.  Remember, ninety percent of this ice-continent is under water.  The original iceberg, B15, which calved from the Ross Ice Shelf in 2000, was 170 miles long.  Now the poor little penguin chicks, isolated by the massive berg, will go free!  Earthdive has a good report, and you can find amazing high-res pictures here.

Hot Jupiter

The current total of extrasolar planets is now at 155.  The latest advance in planetary science, the detection of a planet, one hundred and fifty-million light years away, by its light, is illustrated at APOD. This is difficult for obvious reasons (planets do not reflect much light), so most planets are discovered through the gravitational tug they exert on their stars. HD209458b orbits its 7th magnitude star (visible with binoculars) every 3.5 days.  Why so far?  The planet is a mere 4 million miles from its sun Osiris (compare the earth at around 150 million miles).  The close orbit keeps HD209458b so damn hot that light in the infrared spectrum is emitted in sufficient quantities for Spitzer to see it.