October 2011
8 posts
Russia restores its orbital GLONASS group →
GPS used to be the Global Positioning System. Meaning, the only system of its kind. Although free to use across the world, the system is operated and controlled by the US government. Naturally, this makes other countries uneasy. During the 2008 war in South Ossetia, when the US backed Georgia and Russia backed South Ossetian separatists, GPS was blacked out in the region. There are several...
2 tags
2011 Nobel Prizes →
The 2011 winners of the Nobel prizes in physics and physiology or medicine have been announced. The physics prize goes to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess for their research on a specific class of supernovae, which turned out to be unexpectedly dim, indicating that the universe’s expansion is accelerating. The prize in medicine was awarded to Bruce A. Beutler and Jules A....
Why Is There Music? →
Music is present in all cultures. It’s a very basic thing that nearly all humans enjoy, but unlike, say, food or sex, we can’t connect it to any survival advantage. So why is there music, and what is it we enjoy about it? Those are some questions the Auditory Processing Laboratory at Montreal Neurological Institute is trying to investigate. In a series of papers, scientists from the...
September 2011
5 posts
2 tags
Évariste Galois →
With films like A Beautiful Mind, about the far less eventful life of John Nash, it’s a little surprising that no one’s run with the idea of a biopic about Évariste Galois, whose life ticks all the boxes in the “romanticized mathematician” schema. The real story is so good that it seems unnecessary to fictionalize it further, but there are more myths about Galois than about...
When Intense Belief Kills →
The Atlantic discusses a deadly culture-bound syndrome. When you’re dreaming, your body becomes paralyzed, so that you don’t act out your dreams in sleep. There are two ways this mechanism could fail: either you could not be paralyzed in sleep, in which case you might sleepwalk or worse. Alternatively, you could wake up while paralyzed, and this feeling, known as sleep paralysis, is...
Life on a Cubic Planet →
Planets are not cube-shaped. There’s no physical mechanism that would allow a cubic planet to form naturally, certainly not one the size of Earth, and even if you somehow built one, gravity would eventually turn it into a sphere. This is nothing more than a light-hearted thought experiment. But assuming you had a cube-shaped Earth, what would it be like?
If you were dropped in the middle of...
August 2011
10 posts
Inverse Square Law →
Fun fact: the gravitational attraction between two bodies is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. But so is the relationship between light intensity and distance to the light source. So if you’re all up in someone’s face with a flash and said face turns white, and you want to halve the light, you don’t need to double the distance between subject and...
1 tag
Septal stimulation for the initiation of... →
Not all science is good science (in either sense of the word). Some experiments are simply useless. Some are profoundly unethical.
In 1972, Robert G. Heath published the results of a bizarre study involving a gay man and stimulation of a pleasure system in the brain. Building on studies in rats that showed that stimulating the septal area of the brain produces pleasurable effects—rats...
A Series of Tubes →
Pneumatic tube transportation systems! Horror vacui!In 1812, a man named George Medhurst speculated that it might be possible to blow carriages laden with passengers through a tunnel, but he never got around to building anything. He lacked a pump with enough power to generate the requisite air pressure. In the mid-1850s, there were several rudimentary “atmospheric railways” — in Ireland, London,...
