Tag Archives: science

Comet ATLAS

Leave a reply

And now for something fun and, by definition, not coronavirus related. Not that some people won’t see this as a concurrent sign of the apocalypse. But there is an unusually bright comet called ATLAS out there, and we might be able to see it with the naked eye sometime in April or May.

As to how bright Comet ATLAS will get, that’s anybody’s guess. It might become faintly visible to the naked eye under dark sky conditions by mid- or late April. By mid-May, when it disappears into the bright evening twilight, perhaps it will have brightened to second magnitude — about as bright as Polaris, the North Star.

Space.com

I thought I remembered seeing Halley’s comet in the 1990s, but after reading up on it, I probably remember people talking about Halley’s comet in the 1980s (when I was in elementary school) and then saw either Hyakutake or Hale-Bopp in the 1990s (when I was in college). I live in a brightly lit city now, and am not allowed to leave my house, but back then I lived in Central Pennsylvania and if I drove for 10 minutes in any direction it would get pretty dark.

Anyway, Atlas is supposed to be visible in the North to Northwest sky. I wouldn’t mind learning to read star charts if I ever get the time, but I recently discovered that there are a ton of astronomy apps out there. I’ve been using Sky View, and it’s great but just one of many. You just point your tablet at the sky and it labels whatever is there for you. You can convince yourself it is accurate just by pointing it at the moon. It actually works just fine in the daytime, on a cloudy night, or if you point it down at the ground and want to know what a person looking up at the sky in the Australian outback might be seeing. Space is predictable like that, and GPS works that well on the average device owned by the average Joe. Pretty neat.

And as for the Apocalypse, nobody is suggesting this thing is actually headed anywhere near earth. This article says it will be 273 million miles from the Sun. The Earth is about 90 million miles from the Sun, so that is only three times the distance, but I don’t know if the Earth is on the same side as the comet right now, so it might be more. It’s far and we have plenty of other things to worry about here on our little blue dot.

science trends to watch in 2020

Leave a reply

Wired has a story on science trends to watch in 2020.

  • Stem cells are being used to grow mini-versions of all sorts of human organs, including hearts, kidneys and brains.
  • advances in trying to detect dark matter
  • the end of a key U.S tax credit for solar panels
  • gene editing going mainstream in medical treatments, and newer, safer techniques evolving (pun intended, ha ha!)
  • obvious bond villain Elon Musk launching satellites by the thousands. Also, private flights to the International Space Station.
  • use of massive data sets in “personalized medicine”

Meanwhile, here’s a rundown from LiveScience.com on the weird, wacky world of quantum physics. In a nutshell, these are recent, real-world experiments where matter, energy, and even time do things you wouldn’t think they are supposed to do.

best science and technology stories of 2018 (Longreads)

Leave a reply

The first of the “best of” articles for 2018 are starting to come out. Here is the best of science and technology writing from Longreads. A couple topics caught my eye:

  • a review of a book on how computer algorithms are increasingly taking over our lives, called The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab
  • what’s new with transhumanism, also known as really rich people starting to hope against the odds that death may be optional (hey, they have already figured out how to stop paying taxes, so isn’t cheating death the next logical step?)
  • an article on farming practices specifically focused on maximizing carbon sequestration by building soil

we know what killed the dinosaurs, right?

Leave a reply

Well, apparently there is a loose scientific consensus but still plenty of debate, summarized in this article in The Atlantic.

Before the asteroid hypothesis took hold, researchers had proposed other, similarly bizarre explanations for the dinosaurs’ demise: gluttony, protracted food poisoning, terminal chastity, acute stupidity, even Paleo-weltschmerz—death by boredom. These theories fell by the wayside when, in 1980, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez and three colleagues from UC Berkeley announced a discovery in the journal Science. They had found iridium—a hard, silver-gray element that lurks in the bowels of planets, including ours—deposited all over the world at approximately the same time that, according to the fossil record, creatures were dying en masse. Mystery solved: An asteroid had crashed into the Earth, spewing iridium and pulverized rock dust around the globe and wiping out most life forms.

Their hypothesis quickly gained traction, as visions of killer space rocks sparked even the dullest imaginations. nasa initiated Project Spacewatch to track—and possibly bomb—any asteroid that might dare to approach. Carl Sagan warned world leaders that hydrogen bombs could trigger a catastrophic “nuclear winter” like the one caused by the asteroid’s dust cloud. Science reporters cheered having a story that united dinosaurs and extraterrestrials and Cold War fever dreams—it needed only “some sex and the involvement of the Royal Family and the whole world would be paying attention,” one journalist wrote. News articles described scientists rallying around Alvarez’s theory in record time, especially after the so-called impacter camp delivered, in 1991, the geologic equivalent of DNA evidence: the “Crater of Doom,” a 111-mile-wide cavity near the Mexican town of Chicxulub, on the Yucatán Peninsula. Researchers identified it as the spot where the fatal asteroid had punched the Earth. Textbooks and natural-history museums raced to add updates identifying the asteroid as the killer…

While the majority of her peers embraced the Chicxulub asteroid as the cause of the extinction, Keller remained a maligned and, until recently, lonely voice contesting it. She argues that the mass extinction was caused not by a wrong-place-wrong-time asteroid collision but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions in a part of western India known as the Deccan Traps—a theory that was first proposed in 1978 and then abandoned by all but a small number of scientists. Her research, undertaken with specialists around the world and featured in leading scientific journals, has forced other scientists to take a second look at their data. “Gerta uncovered many things through the years that just don’t sit with the nice, simple impact story that Alvarez put together,” Andrew Kerr, a geochemist at Cardiff University, told me. “She’s made people think about a previously near-uniformly accepted model.”

 

flat earth

Leave a reply

I thought the flat earth thing was just sort of a joke. Apparently not. People believe it, and the way they convince themselves and dismiss any evidence to the contrary is instructive. If people can believe this because it seems to them like “common sense”, they can very easily convince themselves not to try to grasp and understand the more complex science and system interactions that govern so much of our lives.

reproducible research in hydrology

Leave a reply

This October 2016 article in Water Resources Research on reproducible research got some attention.

Hutton, C., T. Wagener, J. Freer, D. Han, C. Duffy, and B. Arheimer (2016), Most computational hydrology is not reproducible, so is it really science?, Water Resour. Res., 52, 7548–7555, doi:10.1002/2016WR019285.

Reproducibility is a foundational principle in scientific research. Yet in computational hydrology the code and data that actually produces published results are not regularly made available, inhibiting the ability of the community to reproduce and verify previous findings. In order to overcome this problem we recommend that reuseable code and formal workflows, which unambiguously reproduce published scientific results, are made available for the community alongside data, so that we can verify previous findings, and build directly from previous work. In cases where reproducing large-scale hydrologic studies is computationally very expensive and time-consuming, new processes are required to ensure scientific rigor. Such changes will strongly improve the transparency of hydrological research, and thus provide a more credible foundation for scientific advancement and policy support.

The Convergence

Leave a reply

from Amazon:

Convergence is a history of modern science with an original and significant twist. Various scientific disciplines, despite their very different beginnings, and disparate areas of interest have been coming together over the past 150 years, converging and coalescing, to identify one extraordinary master narrative, one overwhelming interlocking coherent story: the history of the universe. Intimate connections between physics and chemistry have been revealed as have the links between quantum chemistry and molecular biology. Astronomy has been augmented by particle physics, psychology has been increasingly aligned with physics, with chemistry and even with economics. Genetics has been harmonised with linguistics, botany with archaeology, climatology with myth. This is a simple insight but one with profound consequences. Convergence is, as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg has put it, ‘The deepest thing about the universe.’ This book does not, however, tell the story by beginning at the beginning and ending at the end. It is much more revealing, more convincing, and altogether more thrilling to tell the story as it emerged, as it began to fall into place, piece by piece, converging tentatively at first, but then with increasing speed, vigour and confidence. The overlaps and interdependence of the sciences, the emerging order that they are gradually uncovering, is without question the most enthralling aspect of twenty-first-century science.

are you smarter than Einstein?

Leave a reply

It seems to me that spending your life trying to disprove Einstein is a path to likely disappointment and failure. Nonetheless there are brave souls who dare to challenge (well, tweak maybe…) his theories.

FOR 80 YEARS, scientists have puzzled over the way galaxies and other cosmic structures appear to gravitate toward something they cannot see. This hypothetical “dark matter” seems to outweigh all visible matter by a startling ratio of five to one, suggesting that we barely know our own universe. Thousands of physicists are doggedly searching for these invisible particles.

But the dark matter hypothesis assumes scientists know how matter in the sky ought to move in the first place. At the end of 2016, a series of developments has revived a long-disfavored argument that dark matter doesn’t exist after all. In this view, no missing matter is needed to explain the errant motions of the heavenly bodies; rather, on cosmic scales, gravity itself works in a different way than either Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein predicted.

The latest attempt to explain away dark matter is a much-discussed proposal by Erik Verlinde, a theoretical physicist at the University of Amsterdam who is known for bold and prescient, if sometimes imperfect, ideas. In a dense 51-page paper posted online on Nov. 7, Verlinde casts gravity as a byproduct of quantum interactions and suggests that the extra gravity attributed to dark matter is an effect of “dark energy”—the background energy woven into the space-time fabric of the universe.