Even if astrophysics died today, you could engrave Haldane's words on its tombstone. Photograph: Nasa In the last paragraph of the title essay of this book, JBS Haldane delivers a modest but memorable verdict: "It is my suspicion that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." Haldane composed this sentence around the time that Edwin Hubble confirmed that the universe was not just the Milky Way, but before Hubble began to calculate the rate at which the other newly discovered galaxies were receding; years before the proposal and discovery of antimatter; decades before the confirmation of the big bang theory; the "discoveries" first of dark matter, then of dark energy; before quarks and gluons; before the Higgs ... Continue reading →
Top 10 new species list draws attention to diverse biosphere Related images(click to enlarge) Composite by Sara Pennak/International Institute for Species Exploration/Arizona State University The International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University and a committee of scientists from around the world announced their picks for the top 10 new species described in 2011. This is the fifth year for the top 10 new species list, which was released May 23 to coincide with the anniversary of the birth of Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who was responsible for the modern system of plant and animal names and classifications. On this year's top 10 new species list are a sneezing monkey, a beautiful but venomous jellyfish, an underworld worm and a fungus named for ... Continue reading →
Get up close and personal with an orchestra at The Science Museum As a precocious show-off of a child I would often try to make my mum laugh by “conducting” along to Classic Fm (NB a cake tester makes an excellent baton). There’s something beguiling about the whole performance of classical music, the drama, the incredible skill and the intensity combine to create something epic, and thanks to a new installation at The Science Museum you can immerse yourself right in the epicentre of an orchestra. Universe of Sound is an hour long immersive experience featuring the Philharmonia Orchestra playing Gustav Holst’s The Planets. After recording the 105-piece orchestra using 37 cameras and more than 30 microphones, visitors can see close-up each section’s role, play ... Continue reading →
After overindulging in berries, flocks of cedar waxwings flew drunkenly to their doom. That's the conclusion of a new report in the Journal of Ornithology. Cedar waxwings have evolved to live on a diet that averages 84 per cent fruit. But those evolutionary innovations backfired on several occasions between 2005 and 2007 when flocks of them died after crashing into windows and fences in broad daylight in the Los Angeles area. Residents puzzled by the deaths sent the bodies to the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory in San Bernardino. Necropsies performed by Hailu Kinde and colleagues at the lab showed the birds had been healthy when they gorged on berries from the Brazilian pepper tree, then died from ruptured livers or other traumas ... Continue reading →
Tiny carbon nuggets in meteorites from Mars were formed by cooling magma, not left by ancient alien microbes. That's both good news and bad news for astrobiologists. The 1996 discovery of carbonate structures in meteorite ALH-84001 – which travelled to Earth from Mars more than 13,000 years ago – was hailed at the time as evidence that alien microbes once lived on the red planet. However, subsequent studies of both the carbonate structures and tiny nuggets of macromolecular carbon (MMC) in the meteorite cast doubt on the claims. To better understand where Martian carbon might have come from, Andrew Steele and colleagues at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington DC examined samples from 11 Martian meteorites – including the famed ALH-84001. Previous studies used ... Continue reading →
