Was The Moon Formed In A Day?

What if the Moon was created in a day? A new NASA/Durham University simulation provides an argument that such an event was possible.

Billions of years ago, a version of our Earth that looks very different than the one we live on today was hit by an object about the size of Mars, called Theia – and out of that collision the Moon was formed. How exactly that formation occurred is a scientific puzzle researchers have studied for decades, without a conclusive answer.

Most theories claim the Moon formed out of the debris of this collision, coalescing in orbit over months or years. A new simulation puts forth a different theory – the Moon may have formed immediately, in a matter of hours, when material from the Earth and Theia was launched directly into orbit after the impact.

Sounds Of The Universe

Have you ever wondered what black holes sound like? Humans can't get close enough to a black hole to hear any sounds that they might make and even if we could, do not have the ability to hear frequencies far outside of our range. 

But black holes do make sounds. And some scentists have been boosting the frequencies black holes make to levels that are audible to humans. The results are fascinating. 

In space you can’t hear a black hole scream, but apparently you can hear it sing. In 2003 astrophysicists working with NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory detected a pattern of ripples in the X-ray glow of a giant cluster of galaxies in the constellation Perseus. They were pressure waves — that is to say, sound waves — 30,000 light-years across and radiating outward through the thin, ultrahot gas that suffuses galaxy clusters. 

They were caused by periodic explosions from a supermassive black hole at the center of the cluster, which is 250 million light-years away and contains thousands of galaxies. With a period of oscillation of 10 million years, the sound waves were acoustically equivalent to a B-flat 57 octaves below middle C, a tone that the black hole has apparently been holding for the last two billion years. 

Human Steak??!!!

Want to get your Jeffrey Dahmer on but are turned off by the work needed, the resulting mess, and those pesky police officers bothering you about missing vagrants? Don't worry. New advances in science have got you covered. Now you can eat liver and fava beans with a nice Chianti without any pain in the a$$ detectives demanding DNA samples from you, arresting you at your job, or having your false friends start calling you hurtful nasty names like cannibal and savage.

Advancements in science and technology have done great things for the world, but as the world continues to change, some things are better left untouched. A “DIY meal kit” for growing steak made from human cells was recently nominated for the “design of the year” by the London-based Design Museum, and while it could dramatically change how food is made, the makers are now assuring people eating their food is not “technically” cannibalism. 

Can Dogs Detect Coronavirus?

Imagine going to a friendly doctor who , without any invasive, painful, or costly tests takes a sniff of you, tells you that yes you're sick, licks your hand and then asks you for a treat. 

Travelers arriving at Helsinki’s airport are being offered a voluntary coronavirus test that takes 10 seconds with no uncomfortable nasal swab needed. And the test is done by a dog. A couple of coronavirus-sniffing canines began work at the Finnish airport on Wednesday as part of a pilot program that aims to detect infections using the sweat collected on wipes from arriving passengers. 

Over the past months, international airports have brought in various methods to detect the virus in travelers, including saliva screenings, temperature checks and nasal swabs. But researchers in Finland say that using dogs could prove cheaper, faster and more effective. After passengers arriving from abroad have collected their luggage, they are invited to wipe their necks to collect sweat samples and leave the wipes in a box. Behind a wall, a dog trainer puts the box beside cans containing different scents, and a dog gets to work. 

Opening Funnel Web Spider Sac

These creatures were bred in captivity in part so that humans could make more anti-venom. I am a little taken aback not just by the sheer alien appearance of the spiders but more so by the fact that for some reason Mother Nature has created an animal that despite being no larger than two inches at most, can quickly kill a primate dead with a tiny bit of venom. 

And humans being primates are certainly vulnerable to this. One might think that we'd be large enough so that this venom might only be a minor irritation or that since we aren't the spider's prey that like many other animals, we'd be completely immune to the venom of the Funnel Web Spider. But no dice. Even being exponentially larger than this animal is no protection for us. 

Apparently the males do the majority of the biting and are the particularly venomous ones. This looks like something from the films Alien or The Thing but it's just real life. Unlike with puppies or kittens I don't think very many humans will be lining up to ooh or ahh over these new additions to our planet.

The bite of a Sydney funnel web spider is at first painful, due to the large fangs and acidic pH of the venom. If there is no immediate treatment symptoms may arise beginning 10 minutes after the bite. 

Antibiotics are losing their effectiveness

The problem with getting better at overcoming a problem is that often times the problem evolves and adapts. This has been the case with antibiotic usage. 

Although antibiotics are literally lifesavers, assisting our immune systems  to defeat some very nasty infections, many infections (fungi and bacteria) have evolved to resist and become immune to the antibiotics and antifungals. They've done this very quickly as humans count time but perhaps not as bacteria and fungi count time. 

One reason for this problem is that people across the world (this problem is evidently most acute in South Asia) have overused antibiotics and antifungals in a wide variety of circumstances. So we're seeing more of these organisms shrug off our best attempts at killing them. It's as if prisoners started developing immunity to small arms fire. Such a thing would be an unwelcome surprise to prison guards tasked to stop breakouts.

Check out the fascinating nine minute video below which explains the dire situation we're in and how worse may be yet to come. As pointed out in the video some other reasons that this situation exists include the requirements of globalized capital and an unnatural food supply chain. There is nothing supernatural here but this is nonetheless a very real horror show.

More Flat Earth Dummies

It remains a source of amazement and amusement to me that some people still believe that the earth is flat. From what I can tell this is only a very small minority of folks. Some of them are obvious trolls. Others believe everything is a conspiracy. Still others are just low IQ people with an extremely limited grasp of science and logic. Some think that being contrary by definition means being smart. 

Others flatter themselves that they're just smarter than everyone else. And some are people who reject all science, logic and math as Eurocentric and thus by definition untrue and racist. So it goes. But it's funny to me that when the evidence conclusively disproves the flat earth theory, flat earth adherents drop the evidence and not the theory. 

In what may be one of the most satisfying TV moments we can recall, a group of conspiracy theorists have accidentally spent thousands of dollars to prove that yes, actually, the Earth is round.
The scene in a new Netflix documentary called Behind the Curve, which follows a group of Flat Earthers, a "small but growing contingent of people who firmly believe in a conspiracy to suppress the truth that the Earth is flat".

One of those Flat Earthers is Bob Knodel, who hosts a YouTube channel entirely dedicated to the theory and who is one of the team relying on a $20,000 laser gyroscope to prove the Earth doesn't actually rotate. Except... It does. 

Birds Use Quantum Physics to Navigate

It is difficult for me to accept and believe that at some levels physics is a list of possibilities AND that particles can be at two places at once or even not "decide" where they are until they are observed. So in a very real way we can make our own reality. 

Spooky action at a distance is what Einstein called it. But apparently this is what mathematics and physics tells us. What is more interesting to me though is not the insights humans gain from supercollider experiments but the apparent fact that birds, who by most standards, weren't considered to be the Einsteins of the animal world, use quantum physics/biology to navigate. And that would mean that a bird's perception of and experience of reality is EXTREMELY different from our own.

As little as a decade ago, scientists were sure that the chemistry of life and the weird chemistry of the quantum world were completely separate things. Quantum effects were usually observed only on the nanometer scale, surrounded by hard vacuum, ultra-low temperatures, and a tightly controlled laboratory environment. Biology, however, is a macroscopic world that is warm, messy, and anything but controlled. It seemed elementary that a quantum phenomenon such as 'coherence', in which the wave patterns of every part of a system stay in step, wouldn't last a microsecond in the tumultuous realm of the cell. It would be simply unthinkable.

Or so we thought…

Einstein, Politics and Art

There have been many situations in which artists of varying talent levels have been accused of committing or proven to have committed nasty acts, often criminal, often against women. Others have been accused of saying or believing foul things about women or people of different races, religions or nationalities.. Recently this has led to many people claiming that in order to show our disdain for the artist and his bad actions or thoughts and support for his alleged or actual victims we should remove the artist's works from our playlists, cd players, theater stages, movie and tv screens, galleries, or bookshelves. Other critics of an even more puritanical bent, or perhaps just jealous, have argued that the artist's work itself is hopelessly flawed because of his bad thoughts/actions and thus must be completely expunged from existence and memory. They have argued that by definition anyone who believes or behaves a certain way can not produce work that is worth anything.

I've written before on how I find these approaches short sighted and limiting. But it's of course ultimately a personal and rather arbitrary decision as to which art you patronize. There are artists whose works I don't appreciate because I was exposed to something ugly they said or did before I was exposed to their creative work. And there are artists whose work I appreciate even though were we ever to meet there would likely be nothing but mutual disdain if not hatred. So it goes. But even in the case where I dislike an artist for whatever non-art related reason I have, I still believe that the value of their work stands apart from my subjective response to them. A non-art example of this recently popped up with the reveal of Einstein's travel diaries.

Flat Earthers and Other Dummies

It seems that there has been something of a slight uptick in media attention paid to people who believe that the Earth is flat. The number of people who believe in a flat earth is growing. Some celebrities have endorsed the idea that the world is flat or claimed uncertainty. It doesn't matter to such folk that science, logic, and observation have conclusively shown that the world is round. Flat earthers remain unconvinced by such proofs. People are free to believe whatever they like. The problem with believing such a ridiculous notion as a flat earth is that the flat earther is going to be more open to all sorts of nonsense. One minute you're stating that you have scientific evidence that the world is flat because you took a level on a airplane flight, the next you're claiming that the Atlantic Slave trade and American slavery never took place. It's not so much just that believing in a flat-earth is wrong, but that deliberately ignoring science and data is wrong. 

I'm not claiming that science always leads you to the proper moral or factual point of view. It doesn't. For example, we probably agree, to a lesser or greater extent, that men and women have differences. That's biology. That's science. That, for some grudging, baseline agreement has little to do with whether we think a given society's gender roles are correct or just. I am saying that believing in a flat earth has a domino effect that leads to the dismissal of more and more science, math, and facts. The flat earther must throw away his reasoning ability in order to hold on to an incorrect conclusion. A political system with dumb voters will have trouble sustaining itself. We may be seeing the outcome of that mindset right now. The same people who claim that the earth is flat are never able to take anyone to the edge of the earth. Not every belief is worthy of respect. Watch the below video in which a Maine meteorologist takes five minutes to debunk the flat earth theory.

Bohemian Gravity

I understand very little about physics and even less about string theory. But I think I understand a tiny bit more after watching this video. This was created by Canadian Tim Blais, a musically talented McGill University physics Masters candidate. As it turns out Queen guitarist Brian May, besides having co-written the song (Bohemian Rhapsody) that inspired this cover, also happens to be a professor of astrophysics. He linked to this song on his website and called it astonishingly good. So if you want to get a quick explanation of what string theory is or just like hearing another version of Bohemian Rhapsody, check this out.

Blais said that it’s important that people need to understand the world around them.

“Science also makes you appreciate the immense complexity and beauty of seemingly mundane everyday occurrences; even something as simple as a stirred cup of tea…” he said. “So I would say that people should also understand science just because the world is so much more interesting when they do.”

Blais is no stranger to music: he plays the drums, piano, guitar and other stringed instruments. He’s taking time off from school and turning to music. But, he added, “I’m never going to stop being a scientist at heart.”

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