Category: science
Everything is made of nothing
Be sure to be sitting down when you read this article from the July 2000 issue of Discover magazine.
http://www.discover.com/issues/jul-00/f
Below are the first and last paragraphs to give you an idea of what the article is about. Although these two paragraphs sound pretty "out there", trust me; all the stuff in between makes you start to wonder…
You do not know what stuff is, you who hold it in your hands. Atoms? Yes, stuff is made of atoms. And every atom is a nucleus orbited by electrons. Every nucleus is built of protons. Every proton is – but there you reach the end of the line. Inside the proton lies the deep, unsettling truth: Stuff is made of nothing, or almost nothing, held together by glue, lots of glue. Physicists first began to suspect this in 1973. Lately it has been proved by experiment.
[…]
The closer you look, the more you find the proton is dissolving into lots of particles, each of which is carrying very, very little energy," says Wilczek. "And the elements of reality that triggered the whole thing, the quarks, are these tiny little things in the middle of the cloud. In fact, if you follow the evolution to infinitely short distances, the triggering charge goes to zero. If you really study the equations, it gets almost mystical.
Earth and Asteroid Play Orbital Cat and Mouse Game
From a JPL press release on 2 Jan 2003:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/20
The asteroid, named 2002 AA29, traces an unusual horseshoe pattern relative to Earth. The asteroid alternately leads and follows Earth around the Sun without ever passing it. "In some ways, the Earth and this asteroid are like two racecars on a circular track," said JPL's Dr. Paul Chodas, who discovered the object's unusual motion. "Right now the asteroid is on a slightly slower track just outside Earth's, and our planet is catching up.
Big friggin' spider web
10 million spiders built a web that completely covers a 60-acre field in Canada.
Nice quote on evolution's "goals"
It's a common misunderstanding that evolution has a "goal". You see this most often when evolution is presented as a progression with human-kind as the end result. Evolution simply selects for organisms that are more well adapted to the current local environment; it does not select organisms that are further along the path to some "goal". Mario Ageno, a professor of biophysics put it like this:
"The ideal of a bacterium is not to become a man, but to become two bacteria."
History of the meter
… or "Why is the circumference of the Earth almost exactly 40 million meters?"
Traffic waves (physics for bored commuters)
http://www.amasci.com/amateur/traffic/t
The animated gifs are informative but a bit annoying; don't let them "drive" you out of the site, it's interesting stuff.
There is one "big picture" item that is missing: the total capacity of the road. If a road can only carry 100 cars per minute per lane, it doesn't matter how people drive if 1000 cars per minute want to use that section of road. In that case you're going to have backups no matter what you do. The only solution in that case is to convince people to wait a while before taking their trip. The techniques outlined here work best when the road is nearing its capacity but is not yet at capacity.
I guess you could argue that delaying your trip is just an extreme form of friendly merging behavior… ;-)
BTW, the idea behind on-ramp traffic lights is to space out the cars that are trying to merge (one half of the problem). The benefit of the lights is not obvious, so lots of people complain about them. Interestingly, Minnesota tried an experiment in 2001 where they turned off all the on-ramp traffic lights for several weeks. At that point it became obvious that the lights had been helping because traffic immediately got worse. So everybody voted to turn them back on and now traffic is back to where it was before.
A Grim Choice: The Ravages of Age, or of Cancer?
An International Herald Tribune story about how "Scientists see a no-win link between two human scourges".
Raining instructions
Some people distinguish between biological life and machines. But if you look deeply enough, biological life is just a machine called DNA. Richard Dawkins said it best in chapter 5 of his book The Blind Watchmaker, after observing downy seeds falling from a willow in his garden:
It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any plainer if it were raining floppy discs.
Pointing the way for micro-tubules
As reported in the 27 Oct 2001 issue of Science News, Japanese researchers have found a way to control movement of microtubules. They wanted to get the tubules to move around a circular track in one direction, but the tubules would move randomly. Their solution? Simply point the way.
More precisely, etch arrowheads into the circular track, and the tubules will move in that direction only. A good example showing that building micro-machines requires a different way of thinking compared to building macro-machines.